A Novel Directional MAC in Restricted Access Window for IEEE 802.11ah Networks

The IEEE 802.11ah standard has been released with extended communication range and improved energy efficiency used for the Internet of Things (IoT), Supporting massive number of IoT connections, the IEEE 802.11ah uses group-based contention and restricted access window for the medium access control. To leverage the reuse of resources in the IEEE 802.11ah, this paper proposed a novel directional medium access mechanism inside the restricted access window with geographical sectorized grouping. The proposed mechanism results in significant higher packet delivery ratio and system throughput than the original IEEE 802.11ah standard.