In the Internet of Things scenarios, it is crucially important to provide low energy consumption of client devices. To address this challenge, new Wi-Fi standards introduce the Target Wake Time (TWT) mechanism. With TWT, devices transmit their data according to a schedule and move to the doze state afterwards. The main problem of this mechanism is the clock drift phenomenon, because of which the devices cease to strictly comply with the schedule. As a result, they can miss the scheduled transmission time, which increases active time and thus power consumption. The paper investigates uplink transmission with two different TWT operation modes. With the first mode, a sensor transmits a packet to the access point (AP) after waking up, using the random channel access. With the second mode, the AP polls stations and they can transmit a packet only after receiving a trigger frame from the AP. For both modes, the paper studies how the average transmission time, the packet loss rate and the average energy consumption depend on the different TWT parameters. It is shown that when configured to guarantee the given packet loss rate, the first mode provides lower transmission time, while the second mode provides lower energy consumption.

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Many recent activities of IEEE 802.11 Working group have been focused on improving power efficiency of Wi-Fi to make it favorable for massive Internet of Things scenarios, in which swarms of battery supplied sensors rarely communicate with remote servers. The latest step towards this direction is the work on a new IEEE 802.11ba amendment to the Wi-Fi standard, which introduces Wake-Up Radio. This radio is an additional interface with extremely low power consumption that is used to transmit control information from the access point to stations while their primary radio is switched off. This paper describes the IEEE 802.11ba protocol, discusses its open issues, investigates several approaches to provide energy efficient data transmission with 802.11ba, and evaluates how much 802.11ba improves energy efficiency and even reduces channel time consumption.

Wi-Fi HaLow is an adaptation of the widespread Wi-Fi technology for the Internet of Things scenarios. Such scenarios often involve numerous wireless stations connected to a shared channel, and contention for the channel significantly affects the performance in such networks. Wi-Fi HaLow contains numerous solutions aimed at handling the contention between stations, two of which, namely, the Centralized Authentication Control (CAC) and the Distributed Authentication Control (DAC), address the contention reduction during the link set-up process. The link set-up process is special because the access point knows nothing of the connecting stations and its means of control of these stations are very limited. While DAC is self-adaptive, CAC does require an algorithm to dynamically control its parameters. Being just a framework, the Wi-Fi HaLow standard neither specifies such an algorithm nor recommends which protocol, CAC or DAC, is more suitable in a given situation. In this paper, we solve both issues by developing a novel robust close-to-optimal algorithm for CAC and compare CAC and DAC in a vast set of experiments.