Sensor Grouping for Efficient Communication Resource Utilization for IEEE 802.11ah

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the landscape of wireless communications, with a rapid increase of devices at scales far exceeding previous deployments. Consequently, IEEE Task Group ah (TGah) has undertaken the standardization of a new protocol named IEEE 802.11ah tailored specifically for such large-scale networks. IEEE 802.11ah aims to address one of the primary challenges of IoT networks. Despite the potential of Restricted Access Window (RAW) functions to reduce contention and enhance energy efficiency, the standard does not specify how to manage the scheduling, particularly with respect to the optimal configuration of RAW grouping parameters.Therefore, in this paper, we argue that the performance of grouping strategies is closely tied to the heterogeneous traffic demands of devices. We propose a load-balancing grouping algorithm to improve channel utilization in each group. Our evaluations demonstrate that the proposed load-balancing grouping outperforms traditional greedy grouping, especially in networks connecting many sensors with heterogeneous traffic demands in the IoT context.