Modelling of Energy Consumption in IEEE 802.11ah Networks for M2M Traffic

IEEE 802.11ah is a sub-1 GHz standard designed to meet the requirements of future machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. The standard should be able to support use cases for the M2M communications with thousands of stations capable of generating both periodic and aperiodic traffic for a single access point. In some cases, like environmental and agricultural monitoring, the nodes are typically powered by battery or through energy harvesting. For these applications it is important to use a communication technology that is energy efficient. IEEE 802.11ah tries to achieve this objective for networks with a large nodes number by introducing new energy saving mechanisms and a novel channel access mechanism. This work proposes a mathematical model to compute the energy consumption of an IEEE 802.11ah network.