Fast and Reliable Alert Delivery in Mission-Critical Wi-Fi HaLow Sensor Networks

Evgeny Khorov,Ivan Nasedkin,Ian F Akyildiz,Andrey Lyakhov,Jeroen Famaey,Ruslan Yusupov

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2966147

Abstract

Rapidly evolving, the Internet of Things imposes new challenges for the developers of wireless networks. Various critical infrastructure monitoring scenarios require fast and reliable alert delivery. In such systems, multiple sensors are entrusted to react to the same emergency event. Thus, it is enough to receive an alert message from any of these sensors. However, such a message shall be reliably delivered as soon as possible. The recently published Wi-Fi HaLow standard defines the Restricted Access Window (RAW) mechanism that coordinates transmissions of numerous devices. Thus, it can improve reliability and reduce delays. The paper is the first to study the usage of RAW in a scenario of emergency alerts, where the alert shall be received from at least one sensor. The paper presents an easy-to-calculate mathematical model of alert delivery with RAW. The model allows dynamic online reconfiguration of RAW parameters to select such parameters that minimize consumed channel timeshare while providing satisfactory reliability and delivery delay for an alert. Intensive performance evaluation shows that the RAW is fruitful for mission-critical data delivery in the considered scenario.

Highlights

The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from funny geek demos to the vital paradigm that has a strong impact on almost all areas of economy and human social life
Our goal is to develop an analytical model that can be used for the optimization of Restricted Access Window (RAW) parameters in the emergency alerting scenario
Channel time consumption is an important metric: the lower is channel time consumption, the more devices apart from the considered emergency sensors can work in the heterogeneous Wi-Fi HaLow network

Summary

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from funny geek demos to the vital paradigm that has a strong impact on almost all areas of economy and human social life. IoT involves more and more devices, the majority being wireless [1]. To satisfy heterogeneous requirements of various wireless IoT systems, the community both develops new technologies, such as LoRaWAN or NB-IoT, and adapts the existing ones, like Wi-Fi. Published in 2017, the IEEE 802.11ah [2] amendment, known as Wi-Fi HaLow, aims at bringing a long Wi-Fi success story to the IoT. Published in 2017, the IEEE 802.11ah [2] amendment, known as Wi-Fi HaLow, aims at bringing a long Wi-Fi success story to the IoT It defines many new mechanisms, including those that coordinate channel access: e.g., Restricted Access Window (RAW), Fast association, and Target Wake Time (TWT), etc. If the technology for the smart home cannot deliver data reliably, sometimes a human

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