Abstract
IEEE 802.11ah is a new sub-GHz Wi-Fi technology that provides several advantages over traditional Wi-Fi such as a higher communication range, enhanced scalability, and lower energy consumption, however at the cost of substantially lower throughput. With the aim of simultaneously benefiting from multiple Wi-Fi technologies, recent proposals suggest combining a number of these technologies into a single device. This, however, compromises the energy efficiency of the device, as it implies concurrent utilization of different radio access interfaces. To mitigate this issue, the device should utilize the interface of a certain technology only when there is a high probability of establishing communication over that technology. Traditional vertical handover algorithms are not designed for this purpose as they rely on continuous beacon listening or active probing, even if the device is not in the range of a given technology. To address this issue, vertical handover algorithms based on the combination of devices’ physical locations and either Radio Environmental Maps (REM) or propagation modeling have been proposed. Moreover, their suitability and encouraging performance have been demonstrated for a number of the established Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies. However, their appropriateness for Wi-Fi-based networks with IEEE 802.11ah is currently unknown, which provides the main motivation for this work. Specifically, we carry out an extensive experimental performance evaluation of two location-based vertical handover algorithms in the context of Wi-Fi-based networks with IEEE 802.11ah. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of location-based handovers in this context. We base our findings on the fact that location-based algorithms can maintain comparable data communication quality as the beacon listening-based baseline, while simultaneously reducing the utilization of the IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.11n radio access interfaces by a factor of 2 and 10, respectively.
Highlights
In recent years, we are witnessing an explosion in the number of Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN)-enabled devices
Traditional Wi-Fi technologies offer higher data-rates, their communication range is limited to tens of meters and their energy efficiency and scalability is significantly lower compared to IEEE 802.11ah
We have demonstrated the feasibility of performing locationbased handovers between the IEEE 802.11ah-based LowPower Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) and IEEE 802.11n networks
Summary
We are witnessing an explosion in the number of Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN)-enabled devices. The new IEEE 802.11ah standard [1] is interesting in this context, mainly because it is considered as both an LPWAN and Wi-Fi technology It features a communication range of up to 1 kilometer and provides megabits per second data-rates [2]. Several multi-Radio Access Technology (RAT) devices have been proposed, especially in the LPWAN context, with one prominent example being [5]. Such multi-RAT devices will have to utilize a certain algorithm for deciding if a handover
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