Performance Improvement of a Random Access Channel Protocol Over M2M Communications

The current establishment of the Internet of Things is in essence accompanied by a strong increase of connected devices. By the ubiquitous and almost always autonomous nature of these objects, this quick increment leads us to the emergence of massive wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. Recent forecasts of the NGMN Alliance reveal that in 2020, there will be 10 to 100 times more machine type devices than mobile phones. Since the current cellular networks are not implemented to support this evolution, many research directions are studied to tackle this challenge, such as the exploitation of signal correlations or the channel access protocols. The aim of this paper is to present, from theory to practice, a contention based Random Access Channel protocol, and to perform its performance analysis via simulations. Compared to the existing hybrid algorithm on which it is based, the protocol proposed here roughly achieves the same Maximum Stable Throughput while reduces the average packet delays up to 70%.