(An) efficient hybrid MAC protocol for massive IoT networks

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) which plays a key role in the era of information technology will consistently become an essential part of human life. Massive IoT refers to applications with the huge number of low-cost and low-complexity connected devices in which the data volumes are small and the traffic is sparse but the coverage and scalability are much more important. We develop a new protocol based on the smart grouping strategy that can provide connectivity for IoT devices in the wide area networks with a dense number of nodes that matches the massive IoT scenario. By considering many parameters in the design, such as the number of group heads or the clusters in network, we can adapt and find a good tradeoff in various applications with different requirements in terms of delay and throughput. The numerical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol is more flexible, scalable, and easy to deploy compared with the conventional approaches.