Abstract:

With the increasing development of the IoT applications, heterogeneous wireless networks may coexist. IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g are two wireless technologies designed for IoT applications. 802.11ah is primarily developed for outdoor applications such as smart city and 802.15.4g is principally developed for large scale outdoor process control applications such as smart utility network. Both technologies have communication range up to 1000 meters. Therefore, 802.11ah network and 802.15.4g network are likely to coexist. Our simulation results show that 802.11ah network can severely interfere with 802.15.4g network since 802.11ah devices are more aggressive than 802.15.4g devices in wireless medium access contention. This capability heterogeneity can lead to significant packet loss in 802.15.4g network. Due to asymmetrical features such as modulation scheme and packet structure, devices in different networks can not understand each other. Thus, the self-transmission control mechanism is needed for more aggressive 802.11ah devices. This paper proposes a learning based self-transmission control method for 802.11ah devices to improve their coexistence with 802.15.4g devices. Using the proposed self-transmission control technique, 802.11ah devices predict the packet transmission of 802.15.4g devices and postpone their transmissions to avoid interference. Keywords IoT, heterogeneous, interference, coexistence control, 802.11ah, 802.15.4g.