Abstract:

Low power wide area wireless communication technologies are attracting attention particularly from various IoT applications. IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g are two wireless technologies designed for outdoor IoT applications and installed on consumer devices and systems, for which both technologies operate in frequencies below 1 GHz (Sub-1 GHz Band). In addition, both technologies have communication range up to 1000 meters. Therefore, IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g networks are likely to coexist. Our simulation results using standard defined coexistence mechanisms show that IEEE 802.11ah network can severely interfere with IEEE 802.15.4g network and lead to significant packet loss in IEEE 802.15.4g network. IEEE 802.15.4g network can also impact on packet latency in IEEE 802.11ah network. Accordingly, IEEE New Standards Committee and Standard Board formed IEEE 802.19.3 Task Group in December 2018 to develop an IEEE 802 standard for the coexistence of IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g systems in the Sub-1 GHz frequency bands to guide product deployment. The authors of this paper have been actively leading this standard development. This paper introduces IEEE 802.19.3 standardization activities to address coexistence issues of IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g systems and summarizes our technical contributions for interference mitigation. Simulation results show that our coexistence technologies achieve better coexistence performance.