What Is the Fastest Way to Connect Stations to a Wi-Fi HaLow Network?

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.