On an Efficient Random Access Scheme for Capillary Machine Type Communication

In capillary machine type communications, random multi-access lends itself as a natural choice at the link layer due to the largely intermittent, event-driven traffic involved. A major challenge to that end arises, however, from the anticipated large scale of the network. Considering a carrier sense multiple access based random access protocol where infrastructural support is available in the form of a coordinator node, this paper presents a framework to help sustain efficient protocol performance when faced with temporal variation in packet traffic. The coordinator dynamically determines a timely contention parameter by means of an online algorithm based on certain analytic characterizations of the protocol performance, and the end-nodes get opportunistically notified of it. Throughput, fairness and delay-variation performance produced by the proposed scheme turns out to be consistently close to an optimal protocol in identical settings, in contrast with that of the binary exponential backoff based solutions.