It also benefits from lower energy consumption, allowing the creation of large groups of stations or sensors that cooperate to share signals, supporting the concept of the Internet of things (IoT).
[5] The protocol's low power consumption competes with Bluetooth, LoRa, and Zigbee,[6] and has the added benefit of higher data rates and wider coverage range.
[2] A benefit of 802.11ah is extended range, making it useful for rural communications and offloading cell phone tower traffic.
A prominent aspect of 802.11ah is the behavior of stations that are grouped to minimize contention on the air media, use relay to extend their reach, use little power thanks to predefined wake/doze periods, are still able to send data at high speed under some negotiated conditions and use sectored antennas.
2 MHz channel uses an FFT of 64, of which: 56 OFDM subcarriers, 52 are for data and 4 are pilot tones with a carrier separation of 31.25 kHz (2 MHz/64) (32 μs).
Target Wake Time may be used to reduce network energy consumption, as stations that use it can enter a doze state until their TWT arrives.
It helps to reduce contention and to avoid simultaneous transmissions from a large number of stations hidden from each other.
This operation mode is intended to reduce the number of contention-based channel accesses, improve channel efficiency by minimizing the number of frame exchanges required for uplink and downlink data frames, and enable stations to extend battery lifetime by keeping Awake times short.
More specifically, 802.11af operates in the TV white space spectrum in the VHF and UHF bands between 54 and 790 MHz using cognitive radio technology.