Restricted Access Window-Based Novel Service Differentiation Scheme for Group-Synchronized DCF

Group-synchronized distributed coordination function (GS-DCF) is a group-based medium access mechanism introduced in the IEEE 802.11ah draft standard. GS-DCF implements a novel channel access mechanism called restricted access window (RAW) which splits the channel time into various slots, devices into several groups, and assigns each slot to a group of devices. The Internet of Things is an ideal platform that captures the process and handles a large amount of data from the various heterogeneous applications with different channel access requirements. In this letter, we propose a novel RAW-based service differentiation scheme for GS-DCF. We propose a technique to allocate RAW slots to different applications based on their service requirements with minimal additional overhead. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively provide differentiated services in terms of throughput to the group of devices in GS-DCF.