An adaptive multichannel protocol for large-scale machine-to-machine networks

With the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT), trillions of devices will soon be interconnected and provide new services. The success of IoT relies on the scalability of underlying machine-to-machine communication networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed and adaptive multichannel protocol to address the scalability issue. The proposed protocol is composed of (i) real-time estimation of competing devices, (ii) adaptive channel access probability, and (iii) asynchronous resource reservation. The three features ensure that channel utilization is maximized even when the number of competing devices and their traffic fluctuate dramatically. Our numerical and simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve a channel utilization of up to 93%, especially when the number of competing machine is large. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.