Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11ah Protocol in Wireless Area Network

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) can improve the lives of millions of people. In IoT the smart objects are converted from physical to virtual world to connect with Internet. The IoT enables smart objects to observe, identify, and understand the world without intervention of human-being (Machine-to-Machine communication: M2M). Due to the increasing interest of IoT, M2M, and wireless sensor applications the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) IEEE802.11 standard has taken interest to define a new standard 802.11ah which focuses mainly on IoT applications. The IEEE 802.11ah exploits 802.11 standard advantages and satisfies the IoT requirements by handling large number of devices and that also with reduced power consumption at node/object level. This standard is still in progress and is expected to be approved by 2016. In this paper we would evaluate the performance of IEEE802.11ah protocol through an analytical model using Markov chain model and then evaluate in MATLAB 2013a.