An Energy Efficient Hybrid MAC Protocol With Dynamic Sleep-Based Scheduling for High Density IoT Networks

Advances in the development of low powered sensors has meant they can now provide solutions to Internet of Things (IoT) networks that suffer from restricted power supply and a lack of resource facilities. In this paper, a hybrid time division multiple access (TDMA)-carrier sense multiple access with a collision avoidance mechanism (CSMA/CA) medium access control (MAC) protocol has been proposed that efficiently utilizes the energy of the nodes and dynamically adapts the sleep/wake-up periods according to the variance in the network loads. This hybrid protocol first schedules the TDMA time slots (TDMA
_slots
), and then allocates each slot to a group of devices that compete for the medium using the CSMA/CA. This case is different from the traditional CSMA/CA-TDMA hybrid protocol, in which all the devices compete to access the channel, following which, each successful device is allocated an individual time slot. At the commencement of each superframe, the base station broadcasts a scheduler table, which includes network grouping information that is used by the IoT devices to categorize themselves into wake-up and sleep groups. To reduce the number of collisions or channel access failures, this information permits only one group to compete for each TDMA
_slot
. A 3-D Markov model is used to develop a per user stochastic behavior for the proposed hybrid MAC protocol-based adaptable sleep mode. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol, which improves the network throughput and enhances energy conservation by 40%-60% more than the IEEE 802.15.4-based MAC protocol.