Hybrid Slotted-CSMA/CA-TDMA for Efficient Massive Registration of IoT Devices

Recently, the Wi-Fi alliance announced a new Wi-Fi standard known as IEEE 802.11ah (or Wi-Fi HaLow) to efficiently support Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the existing registration method under IEEE 802.11ah, based on carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), was analyzed as not efficient enough for registration of large-scale machine-to-machine (M2M) communications where a massive number of devices try to access a single, centralized access point (AP). In this paper, we propose a hybrid slotted-CSMA/CA–time-division multiple access (TDMA) (HSCT) medium access control (MAC) protocol for efficient massive registration of IoT devices (up to 8000) in M2M networks. We focus on situations, where a large number of M2M devices simultaneously try to register at a single, centralized AP. In the proposed HSCT, contention-based slotted-CSMA/CA allows devices to send an authentication request via randomly selected backoff slots, whereas contention-free TDMA permits those devices to send/receive the subsequent association request/association response via an individually allocated TDMA slot. In addition, a centralized authentication control (CAC)-based mechanism with modified algorithms for optimal selection of CAC parameters and the slotted fixed-window CSMA protocol with Sift geometric probability distribution are used to mitigate severe contention between massive registrations upon network (re-)initialization from an AP reboot. This paper also analyzes the performance of the proposed scheme and determines the optimal configuration to enhance registration performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed HSCT MAC protocol achieves substantial improvement, compared with the contention-free transmission, a combined authentication/association scheme, and the conventional IEEE 802.11ah with CSMA/CA.