Efficient Cluster Head Selection in IEEE 802.11ahfor IoT Applications

IEEE 802.11ah is a wireless LAN standard in the sub-1-GHz license-exempt bands for cost-effective and long-range communication. The most challenging issue in IEEE 802.11ah is to ensure that thousands of stations associate efficiently with a single access point. When several thousand stations try to associate with the access point during network initialization, it causes channel contention and long association delay. IEEE 802.11ah has introduced an authentication control mechanism (ACM) that divides the stations into groups allowing fewest stations to access the medium. In this paper, we propose to automate the cluster head selection using LEACH. Simulation results reveal that our proposed method is efficient in terms of association delay.