A multi-station block acknowledgment scheme in dense IoT networks

Abstract

Recently, the IEEE started a new task group, i.e., the IEEE 802.11ax, to investigate and deliver next generation WLAN technologies for the scenarios of dense IoT (Internet of Things) networks with a large number of stations and access points. Indeed, accompanying with the fast growing density of nodes, new technologies have to be proposed to handle the emerging issues in dense IoT environment which are usually not existent in traditional networks under sparse or medium density. In this paper, to reduce the significant communication overheads and latency especially in dense IoT networks, a block acknowledgement scheme for uplink single-user transmissions is presented. By shortening the inter-frame interval, decreasing the access attempts and compressing the frame length, our proposed model could greatly improve the MAC efficiency gain compared with traditional schemes. In addition, by combining the traditional BA (Block Acknowledgment) and Multi-STA BA (Multi-station Block Acknowledgement) strategies together in our model, the overall experienced latency by multiple stations’ access as well as the end-to-end delay for each station could be greatly reduced. Simulation results show that our scheme could outperform the traditional acknowledgment protocols in IEEE 802.11 in terms of MAC efficiency gain and experienced delay.