Reliable and Efficient Access for Alarm-initiated and Regular M2M Traffic in IEEE 802.11ah Systems

EEE 802.11ah is a novel WiFi-based protocol, aiming to provide an access solution for the machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. In this paper, we propose an adaptive access mechanism that can be seamlessly incorporated into IEEE 802.11ah protocol operation and that supports all potential M2M reporting regimes, which are periodic, on-demand We show that it is possible to both efficiently and reliably resolve all reporting stations in the cell, within the limits of the allowed deadlines. As a side result, we also provide a rationale for modeling the inter-arrival time in alarm events by using the Beta distribution, a model that is considered in the 3GPP standardization.