Abstract. In order to cope with the rapid development of the Internet of things, IEEE working group has proposed a new wireless network technology, 802.11ah. IEEE 802.11ah operates at sub 1GHz band, and can provide long transmission range, wide coverage, while supporting more than 6,000 of station to be connected. In order to alleviate the high collision probability, 802.11ah MAC protocol involves in the RAW (restricted access window) mechanism combined with grouping mechanism. However, in 802.11ah WLAN (wireless local area network), most of the stations operate at sleep mode, and it is expected that at the start of a BI, the network suffers much higher collision probability than at the latter period of the BI. In order to improve these drawbacks, we propose an adaptive contention window scheme based on which an optimum contention window size is adapted at the start of the BI, and then gradually halved when the transmission completes successfully. Through conducting simulations, we prove that our proposed protocol can enhance the performance of 802.11ah WLAN.