Performance evaluation of grouping and regrouping scheme for mitigating hidden station problem in IEEE 802.11ah network

Abstract

An Access Point can support up to 8192 stations with a coverage area of 1 km in the IEEE 802.11ah network. Due to its large communication area, this network severely suffers from hidden station problem. The various grouping strategies are used to separate hidden pairs, but with more communication overheads and computational complexity. To mitigate this, the efficient Randomness Region-based Grouping (RRG) and Proximity-based Regrouping Scheme (PRS) are proposed in this paper. The RRG partitions the entire network into a number of regions based on their closeness to reduce the active hidden stations. The PRS further reduces hidden stations using distance matrix and regroups into existing or new groups based on the Centroid of the neighbour groups. The proposed Markov model and NS3 simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithms outperform the other algorithms in terms of throughput, packet loss, packet collision rate, and fairness index.