A Survey of the State of the Art of 802.11ah

Wireless networking technologies are the best options to connect a large number of devices. The emerging IEEE 802.11ah, aka Wi-Fi HaLow, is a promising communication standard that supports a massive number of heterogeneous devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). It utilizes sub-1 GHz license-exempt bands to provide an extended range to the Wi-Fi networks. This standard seeks to address various limitations of legacy 802.11 Wi-Fi by incorporating enhancements in both the PHY and MAC layers. This work assesses the evolution and the market readiness of this new, low power Wi-Fi standard. It focuses on the technical challenges faced by this standard. This standard is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to evaluate its successful deployment. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of 802.11ah and identify how device manufacturers are responding to this new standard and the promising research directions in this area.