Design and verification of IEEE 802.11ah for IoT and M2M applications

In order to efficiently support the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, a new amendment for the Wi-Fi standard known as IEEE 802.11ah is introduced. In 802.11ah (or Wi-Fi HaLow), several enhanced MAC features are added in order to provide scalability for a large number of stations, increase the range of operation, while at the same time reduce the energy consumption compared to the existing Wi-Fi standards. In this paper, a Verilog RTL implementation of the new standard is presented. It is suitable for IoT, M2M, V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) applications, and smart grids that require long battery life and long range reliability. Software simulations using Xilinx Vivado are also provided to verify the design. The design is then synthesized using the same tool, and performance, power, and area are reported.