IoT-MAC: A Channel Access Mechanism for IoT Smart Environment

A large number of sensor and actuator devices are being deployed for sensing and automation in a smart environment. While enabling communication for a large number of stations with RAW in IEEE 802.11ah, the state-of-the-art solutions for channel access are deficient in dealing with both periodic uplink and event-driven downlink actuation at the same time, as per the application’s criteria. In this paper, we propose IoT-MAC, a downlink traffic-aware Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for automation in smart spaces. The proposed scheme uses new RAW frames to schedule downlink actuation traffic, considering the periodicity and freshness of uplink traffic. IoT-MAC identifies the periodicity of uplink traffic and schedules a frame without further contention. It then prioritizes critical downlink traffic without losing fresh uplink data. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme shows significant improvement in terms of throughput, delay, power consumption and packet loss for running different IoT applications.