Performance and Power Consumption Analysis of IEEE802.11ah for Smart Grid

Abstract

IEEE802.11ah is a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) designed for the application of Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M), mainly used in sensor network, smart metering, car network, health care, and other emerging fields. IEEE802.11ah inherits the IEEE802.11n\ac technology. At present, smart grid has completed the installation of optical fiber communication as its backbone network; WLAN can be used to build new wireless sensor network for smart grid by improving the transmission distance, speed, and power efficiency. The critical features of 802.11ah make it a powerful candidate for WLAN in smart grid, such as intelligent substation sensor network and automatic metering system (AMS). This paper simulates the new added highly robust 1MHz bandwidth and Modulation Coding Scheme (MCS) 10 in the 802.11ah physical layer and analyzes the coverage range and energy-saving performance of 802.11ah based on the simulation results. The analysis shows that the 802.11ah at 1 MHZ MCS 10 mode can obtain 2.5-3 dB gain. Combined with advantages of Sub-1GHz working frequency, 802.11ah could enlarge the coverage range by five times, compared to 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. On the other side, 802.11ah module used in the smart grid can greatly reduce power consumption, especially in the AMS with a 1.1 kW.H power savings per year. 802.11ah not only provides the flexibility and low cost features of wireless communication, but also brings coverage and energy-saving performance improvements, which leads to good economic benefit.

Resource Management for Massive Internet of Things in IEEE 802.11ah WLAN: Potentials, Current Solutions, and Open Challenges

“…Smart grid applications include smart metering, home energy management, load management, demand and response, outage detection, renewable generation, distributed storage, distributed generation, vehicle to grid, etc. [ 24 , 25 , 50 , 51 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 ].…”

Green IoT for Eco-Friendly and Sustainable Smart Cities: Future Directions and Opportunities

“…Regarding harvesting energy, many studies focus on greening the communication network based on harvested energy, such as [124][125][126]. In [124], the authors focused on resource allocation techniques used for maximizing the energy efficiency of the green cognitive radio network.…”

“…Furthermore, Ge et al [125] discussed the cognitive radio network secured based on multiple-input single-output using to minim transmit the information signal's power. However, Zheng et al [126] introduced the smart grid's performance and power consumption based on analyzing IEEE802.11ah. The authors [127] introduced different techniques for greening communication networks in term of energy-efficiency metrics.…”

A Comprehensive Review on Energy Harvesting Integration in IoT Systems from MAC Layer Perspective: Challenges and Opportunities

“…Along with the analytical models, empirical power consumption analyses have been performed based on real hardware measurements included in the Orinoco Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) card data sheet [ 79 ] and smart grid IEEE 802.11ah chip designed in [ 80 ]. The analytical models do not consider the energy consumption of hardware components such as the microcontroller, whereas energy models based on real measurements do so.…”