A Cooperative MAC Protocol for a M2M Heterogeneous Area Network

With the increasing demand of Machine to Machine (M2M) communications and Internet of Things (IoT) services it is necessary to develop a new network architecture and protocols to support cost effective, distributed computing systems. Generally, M2M and IoT applications serve a large number of intelligent devices, such as sensors and actuators, which are distributed over large geographical areas. To deploy M2M communication and IoT sensor nodes in a cost-effective manner over a large geographical area, it is necessary to develop a new network architecture that is cost effective, as well as energy efficient. This paper presents an IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 standards-based heterogeneous network architecture to support M2M communication services over a wide geographical area. For the proposed heterogeneous network, we developed a new cooperative Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium access control (MAC) protocol to transmit packets using a shared channel in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. One of the key problems of the IEEE 802.11/802.15.4 heterogeneous network in a dense networking environment is the coexistence problem in which the two protocols interfere with each other causing performance degradation. This paper introduces a cooperative MAC protocol that utilizes a new signaling technique known as the Blank Burst (BB) to avoid the coexistence problem. The proposed MAC protocol improves the network QoS of M2M area networks. The developed network architecture offers significant energy efficiency, and operational expenditure (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX) advantages over 3G/4G cellular standards-based wide area networks.