Energy Efficient MAC for Cellular-Based M2M Communications

In Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networks, an energy efficient scalable medium access control (MAC) is crucial for serving massive battery-driven machine-type devices. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficient MAC design to minimize battery power consumption in cellular-based M2M communications. We present an energy efficient MAC protocol that not only adapts contention and reservation-based protocols for M2M communications in cellular networks, but also benefits from partial clustering to handle the massive access problem. Then we investigate the energy efficiency and access capacity of contention-based protocols and present an energy efficient contention-based protocol for infra-cluster communication of the proposed MAC, which results in huge power saving. The simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms the others in energy saving without sacrificing much delay or throughput. Also, the lifetimes of both individual nodes and the whole M2M network are significantly extended.