Enhanced registration procedure with NAV for mitigated contentions in M2M communications

Abstract

In Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications based on IEEE 802.11ah protocol, a single access point (AP) should support up to 8000 stations within a coverage range of 1 Km using relatively low sub-1GHz wireless communication channel. The registrations of a large number of stations at network initialization or at any reboot of AP after a power failure, usually take more than 1 minute that prohibits agile cognitive sensing and adaptive control. In this paper, we propose an enhanced registration procedure for M2M communications based on IEEE 802.11ah with mitigated contention. In the proposed registration procedure, the authentication request/response and association request/response messages are extended to carry network allocation vector (NAV) to allocate the communication channel for combined processing of authentication and association to minimize contentions generated by massive wireless channel accesses from up to 8000 stations. We also analyze the optimal configuration of parameters of authentication control threshold (ACT)-based contention mitigations in registrations. The simulation experiments show that the proposed registration procedure with combined authentication and association reduces more than 15% of registration time for 8000 stations compared to currently existing solutions.