Collision Prevention for Duty-Cycle Receiver-Initiation MAC Protocol via Multiple Access Reservation (MAR-RiMAC)

The prevalence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in more and more applications associated with our daily lives has induced a dense network in which numerous wireless devices, many of which have limited capabilities (e.g., power, memory, computation), need to communicate with the internet. One of the main bottlenecks of this setup is the wireless channel. Numerous medium access control (MAC) protocols have been devised to coordinate between devices that share the wireless channel. One prominent approach that is highly suitable for IoT and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which rely on duty cycling, is the receiver-initiated approach, in which, rather than the transmitter, the receiver initiates the transaction. The problem with this approach is that when many devices are trying to respond to the receiver’s transmission invitation and transmit simultaneously, a collision occurs. When the network is highly loaded, resolving such collisions is quite tedious. In this paper, we devise an enhancement to the receiver-initiated approach that aims at preventing this inherent collision scenario. Our modification relies on multiple devices sending a short predefined signal, informing their intended receiver of their intention to transmit simultaneously. The data transaction is done via a four-way handshake in which, after all backlogged devices have informed their designated receiver of their desire to transmit simultaneously, the receiver identifies them and polls them one by one, avoiding the collision. We compare the performance of Receiver-Initiated-MAC protocol (RI-MAC), which is one of the prevalent receiver-initiated protocols, with and without the suggested enhancement, and show superior air-time utilization under high traffic loads, especially in the presence of hidden terminals.