An adaptive multichannel protocol for large-scale machine-to-machine (M2M) networks

Abstract

With the emergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, trillions of devices will soon be interconnected to support new applications and services. The success of M2M communication relies on the scalability of underlying network architectures and protocols. In this paper, an adaptive multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed to address the scalability issue in M2M communications. The proposed MAC protocol enables devices to (1) real-time estimate the number of competing devices and (2) adjust their operation parameters to maximize channel utilization. Our numerical results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing multi-channel protocols, especially when the number of competing devices is large and fluctuates with time.