Unified Medium Access Control Architecture for Resource-Constrained Machine-to-Machine Devices

Abstract

In capillary machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, which is being considered as a feasible network solution for M2M applications, because of physical resource constraints and deployment conditions, an energy-efficient and scalable medium access control (MAC) protocol is crucial for numerous M2M devices to concurrently access wireless channels. Therefore, this paper presents a unified MAC layer architecture for resource-constrained M2M devices in capillary M2M networks [named as resource-constrained MAC architecture (RCMA)], which has a unified (monolithic) framework consisting of essential functional components to support MAC-related operations of M2M devices: multi-channel hybrid MAC (McHM), logical link control (LLC), time synchronizer (TS), and device on--off scheduler (DO2S). McHM provides a baseline MAC protocol for an entire capillary M2M system that combines the benefit of both contention-based carrier sense multiple access and schedule-based time division multiple access schemes, whereas the other three components help in the McHM operations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the RCMA, we implement the whole stack using the QualNet simulator. Experimental results show that the RCMA outperforms the conventional ZigBee stack in terms of energy efficiency and scalability, even under heavy traffic conditions.