IEEE 802.11ah-Enabled Internet-of-Drone Architecture

IEEE 802.11ah is considered as a promising and scalable solution for connecting a large number of drones. With the support of sub-1GHz channel bands, relay, and group-based channel access mechanism, 802.11ah can help drone stations for collecting commands, sending data, and processing response to the control room. However, achieving required throughput and latency is still challenging due to high mobility and dynamic relaying requirement. This article proposes an IEEE 802.11ahbased Internet-of-Drones (IoD) architecture for surveillance and remote control. Our scheme predicts the location of a drone and places the required association and channel access configuration to a relay node dynamically. Moreover, the current mode of a drone station is switched to relay from station as per the location. The relay nodes use transmission opportunity (TXOP) with implicit acknowledgement to increase the efficiency of the network. The performance analysis shows significant improvement in terms of throughput and latency.