Abstract
Since the conception of the Internet of things (IoT), a large number of promising applications and technologies have been developed, which will change different aspects in our daily life. This paper explores the key characteristics of the forthcoming IEEE 802.11ah specification. This future IEEE 802.11 standard aims to amend the IEEE 802.11 legacy specification to support IoT requirements. We present a thorough evaluation of the foregoing amendment in comparison to the most notable IEEE 802.11 standards. In addition, we expose the capabilities of future IEEE 802.11ah in supporting different IoT applications. Also, we provide a brief overview of the technology contenders that are competing to cover the IoT communications framework. Numerical results are presented showing how the future IEEE 802.11ah specification offers the features required by IoT communications, thus putting forward IEEE 802.11ah as a technology to cater the needs of the Internet of Things paradigm.
Highlights
In recent years, we have witnessed an exponential growth in the evolution and development of different communication technologies addressed to support the Internet of things (IoT)
The potential coverage at reasonably high rates exhibited by IEEE 802.11ah makes it an attractive alternative in fulfilling the needs of future IoT communications
We provide a comparison between different technologies contending to cover the IoT communications framework, and indicate IEEE 802.11 technology as one of the strongest contenders
Summary
We have witnessed an exponential growth in the evolution and development of different communication technologies addressed to support the IoT. The upcoming IoT applications are enablers of innovative concepts such as smart cities, smart/e-health, smart metering and smart things Each of these applications has particular requirements, i.e., different data rates, low power consumption, low cost of implementation, large number of supported devices and the capacity to cover different distance ranges. ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4e has been used in most of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) due to its low implementation cost, the large number of supported devices, the offered data rates We provide an overview of the mechanism used by IEEE 802.11ah to tackle these challenges
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