TR2021-116

Sub-1 GHz Wireless Coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4g and IEEE 802.11ah Using Hybrid CSMA/CA

    •  Nagai, Y., Guo, J., Sumi, T., Orlik, P.V., Mineno, H., "Sub-1 GHz Wireless Coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4g and IEEE 802.11ah Using Hybrid CSMA/CA", International Journal of Informatics Society, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 55-66, September 2021.
      BibTeX TR2021-116 PDF
      • @article{Nagai2021sep,
      • author = {Nagai, Yukimasa and Guo, Jianlin and Sumi, Takenori and Orlik, Philip V. and Mineno, Hiroshi},
      • title = {Sub-1 GHz Wireless Coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4g and IEEE 802.11ah Using Hybrid CSMA/CA},
      • journal = {International Journal of Informatics Society},
      • year = 2021,
      • volume = 13,
      • number = 2,
      • pages = {55--66},
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2021-116}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Areas:

    Communications, Optimization, Signal Processing

Abstract:

As more and more wireless technologies have been developed to support emerging IoT applications, the coexistence of these heterogeneous wireless technologies presents challenges. IEEE 802.15.4g and IEEE 802.11ah are two of such wireless technologies specified for outdoor IoT applications and designed to operate in the Sub-1 GHz (S1G) frequency band. Due to constrained spectrum allocation in the S1G band, two types of devices may be forced to coexist, i.e., share frequency spectrum. Therefore, the coexistence of 802.15.4g and 802.11ah must be addressed. To investigate coexistence behavior of these two wireless technologies, we first identify coexistence issues using our newly developed NS-3 based S1G band coexistence simulator. Simulation results confirm that 802.15.4g performance can significantly degrade due to the 802.11ah interference. Accordingly, we propose a novel hybrid CSMA/CA mechanism for IEEE 802.15.4g to address the identified coexistence issues. We then present several distributed and network assisted methods for 802.15.4g devices to estimate 802.11ah interference severity and switch channel access mode for interference mitigation. The conducted performance analysis shows that the proposed hybrid CSMA/CA can improve 802.15.4g performance without sacrificing 802.11ah performance.