HG-MAC: A Energy-Efficient Protocol for M2M Network

The machine-to-machine network has become a leading solution in many important fields, such as battlefield surveillance, transport systems, industrial and agricultural automation. Typically, a M2M network consist of a large number of battery powered, concurrently access devices. Simplex MAC protocols can not adopt this situation. In this paper, a Hybrid and Grouping MAC (HG-MAC) is proposed. In HG-MAC, devices are grouped and graded to reduce collision and offer QoS guarantee. Through consisting of contention-based protocol and schedule-based protocol, devices can enter dormant state to improve energy-efficient. To improve flexibility, the duration of contention period and transmission period can be changed. The duration of transmission period is decided by the contention period length, thus the contention period length is a significant factor to the network performance. An analysis of the relationship between the contention period length and the average transmission rate is made in this paper. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HG-MAC protocol.