2CA-R2: A Hybrid MAC Protocol for Machine-Type Communications

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications are becoming the most important factor shaping network traffic. However, traditional controls developed for human-generated traffic are not able to cope with new demands. Thus, hybrid MAC protocols have been proposed to make use of the combined advantages of contention and reservation. Most of them are based on a contention stage (where a variant of CSMA/CA or ALOHA is used) followed by a reservation stage (e.g., TDMA or FDMA). In this paper, we introduce 2CA-R², a hybrid MAC protocol for M2M communications intended to be used in the device domain. What distinguishes this proposal is that the contention stage is controlled by a conflict-resolution algorithm known as Adaptive-2C. The protocol was evaluated using a model based on a Markov chain and computer simulations. Its performance was compared with DCF, the MAC technique used in IEEE802.11 standards. Our results show significant improvements over DCF in various metrics of network performance across different traffic situations. We also evaluated the time the protocol takes to resolve an access conflict, and we observed substantial improvements in the number of stations that can be served with the same network resource (in some cases, around a 40% improvement).