Parth Amin

Coverage analysis of Bluetooth low energy and IEEE 802.11ah for office scenario

In this paper, a coverage analysis of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and IEEE 802.11ah technologies for indoor scenarios is performed. This is of particular relevance when these technologies are deployed as part of capillary networks. The physical layer parameters of BLE and IEEE 802.11ah are modeled, together with a detailed and accurate indoor propagation scenario that accounts for wall losses, ray tracing multi-path, and diffractions. A real case office building scenario is considered for practical evaluation. The minimum density of BLE central devices and IEEE 802.11ah access points that guarantees a predetermined coverage level is derived and compared between the two technologies. It is shown that BLE requires five times the number of central devices than IEEE 802.11ah access points to guarantee 95% coverage. IEEE 802.11ah benefits from the use of lower frequency band, higher transmit power and better receiver sensitivity than BLE, which permits a low cost and effective deployment of Internet of Things applications. Mesh capabilities and range extension for BLE are therefore essential for the success of BLE within the Internet of Things framework.

Comparison of 802.11ah and BLE for a home automation use case

IEEE 802.11ah and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are candidates to become key technologies for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, 802.11ah and BLE technologies are evaluated and compared in a home automation scenario. The selected use case includes battery powered sensors, which generate traffic, and mains powered actuators, which consume traffic, connected through a central gateway. The performance is assessed in terms of service ratio, delay and activity factor of the transceivers. Results show that both technologies are suitable for the reference use case scenario. 802.11ah benefits from a higher throughput and lower delay jitter, whereas BLE sensors show lower activity factors and a longer battery lifetime is expected. The analysis is conducted for both fixed and variable traffic load. The performance of BLE results to be more sensitive to an increase of the traffic load with respect to 802.11ah. Eventually, the limitations of the current scenario are illustrated and alternative setups are discussed.

Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11ah Actuators

We analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11ah technology in an actuation use case for connected lighting from the perspective of latency and power consumption at the actuator in the downlink direction. The study includes network configurations with different beacon frame transmission intervals, channel bandwidths, group of stations in power-save mode as well as unicast-multicast transmissions using different modulation and coding schemes. The results show the existing trade off between the desired latency and power consumption at the actuator station as shorter beacon frame intervals are required to achieve lower latency. A system deployed using 2 MHz of channel bandwidth leads to lower transmission delays and power consumption compared to a 1 MHz system. Also, the study shows how grouping based on transmission indication map further affects latency and power consumption. Furthermore, addressing each actuator with a unicast transmission from the wireless access point limits the number of supported actuators and good latency performance is obtained when groups of actuators are commanded together utilizing broadcast-multicast transmissions with appropriate choice of modulation and coding scheme.

System-level analysis of IEEE 802.11ah technology for unsaturated MTC traffic

Enabling the Internet of Things, machine-type communications (MTC) is a next big thing in wireless innovation. In this work, we concentrate on the attractive benefits offered by the emerging IEEE 802.11ah technology to support a large number of MTC devices with extended communication ranges. We begin with a comprehensive overview of the novel features introduced by the latest IEEE 802.11ah specifications followed by the development of a powerful mathematical framework capturing the essential properties of a massive MTC deployment with unsaturated traffic patterns. Further, we compare our analytical findings for a characteristic MTC scenario against respective system-level simulations across a number of important performance indicators. Our analytical results provide adequate performance predictions even when simulations are challenged by the excessive computational complexity. In addition, we study the novel IEEE 802.11ah mechanisms offering improved support for massive device populations and conclude on their expected performance.