Scalability and Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11ah IoT Deployments: A Testbed Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-world testbed for IEEE 802.11ah IoT networks, revealing performance limitations, interference issues, and energy consumption insights crucial for practical deployment and optimization.

Contribution

First comprehensive real-world evaluation of IEEE 802.11ah IoT networks highlighting unexpected performance behaviors and energy considerations.

Findings

Significant throughput degradation under network contention and interference.

Adjacent Channel Interference severely impacts link performance.

Energy consumption analysis informs deployment strategies.

Abstract

This work focuses on the development and assessment of modern wireless Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, with relevance to emerging 5G and beyond applications. To analyze the growing demands for data, and their impact, we built an IEEE 802.11ah (WiFi Halow) office testbed for real-world experimentation. This deployment allows us to uncover the practical performance and scalability limitations of such networks under various challenging scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to consider complex real-world IEEE 802.11ah implementations, aiming specifically to reveal unexpected performance behaviors, such as significant throughput degradation arising in closely deployed wireless links. Our findings show that intense network contention and Adjacent Channel Interference (ACI), drastically impact the performance of the wireless links involved. Beyond evaluating network performance, our experimental analysis also considers the energy consumption of the devices under test, offering a more holistic perspective on the feasibility of IEEE 802.11ah in real-world deployments. The effective disclosure of such unexpected phenomena, can lead to well planned decisions and energy consumption optimization across the IoT to Cloud continuum.