Energy and bandwidth-efficient channel access for local area machine-to-machine communication

Ticket Election Multiple Access (TEMA) is introduced for local machine-to-machine communication that is energy and bandwidth-efficient. TEMA is based on distributed elections held among nodes to gain interference-free access to the channel in either unicast or broadcast mode. Non-transmitting nodes can infer whether or not they are the intended receiver of a transmission and act accordingly to save energy, without the need for particular traffic patterns or explicit future transmission schedules. TEMA is shown to be correct in the sense that the channel access schedules are collision-free at the intended receivers, and intended receivers are always in receiving state. An analytical model of the performance of the protocol is used to show that TEMA attains energy-efficiency and high channel utilization even under heavy traffic and high node density conditions. A simulation-based performance analysis validates the analytical results and shows that TEMA outperforms representatives of contention-based and interference-free protocols in terms of energy efficiency, network goodput, and channel access delay. More specifically, it reduces energy consumption to half of that of state-of-the-art distributed election-based protocols while providing up to 25% increase in goodput and up to 50% decrease in channel access delay.