Low-Power MAC design for M2M Communications in Cellular Networks: Protocols and Algorithms

Abstract: Machine-to-Machine Communication (M2M) is the communications between wireless devices without human interventions. As a fundamental enabler of Internet of Things, M2M is growing fast and implemented in many areas. The number of M2M devices is expected to be extremely large in the future. In most cases they are battery driven and positioned in broad areas so that it would be costly to frequently replace or charge their batteries. To save the cost of maintaining M2M systems in the long term, energy consumption needs to be minimized so that battery lives of M2M devices can be maximized, which motivates the design of a lowpower MAC protocol in this thesis. The related works have indicated that idle listening and collisions are the main sources of power waste. In the proposed low-power MAC protocol design, various methods that would help preserving energy are considered. We first analyze the performance of three conventional protocols, TDMA, CSMA, and reservation-based protocol. The packet delay, energy consumption, and system throughput performances of these protocols are evaluated with both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. Our results show that CSMA has better packet delay and throughput performances while static and dynamic TDMAs are more energy efficient. Furthermore, we design a hybrid energy-efficient MAC protocol for M2M communications. This solution not only improves existing protocols, but also takes the advantage of clustering in cellular networks to save energy. We show by simulation results that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms others in energy saving, without sacrificing much on delay or throughput. This is because with clustering, transmission power of remote nodes can be greatly reduced after they become members of clusters. With the proposed MAC protocol, the lifetimes of both individual nodes and the whole M2M network are significantly extended.