Priority-Based Uplink Raw Slot Utilization in the IEEE 802.11ah Networks

The IEEE 802.11ah standard allows an Access Point (AP) to connect up to 8192 stations at a transmission range of up to 1 km. The goal of the IEEE 802.11ah standard is to maintain wide connectivity and energy efficiency. Some stations are allocated to RAW slots, but they do not have uplink data packets to transmit results in low channel efficiency. The new MAC protocol (PUT-MAC) allows stations to use adjacent RAW slots in a priority manner to improve channel access usage efficiency. The stations use different Arbitration Inter Frame Space and contention window values to contend channel in the same RAW slot. The paper conducts simulations to compare the network performance of the PUT-MAC protocol with the IEEE 802.11ah.