Energy harvesting-aware contention tree-based access for wireless Machine-to-Machine networks

The Energy Harvesting-aware Contention Treebased Access (EH-CTA) protocol is presented in this paper as a novel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networks where end-devices are equipped with energy harvesters. The protocol is theoretically modeled to analyze its performance. A performance comparison with an EH-aware Dynamic Frame Slotted-ALOHA (EH-DFSA) shows its superior performance. While EH-DFSA requires an estimation of the number of contenders per frame in order to dynamically adjust the frame length, EH-CTA uses short and fixed frame lengths. This ensures scalability and facilitates synchronization in highly dense M2M networks.