Framed slotted aloha based MAC protocol for low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks

Recently, the IEEE TG4k has been formed to amend the IEEE 802.15 family to address the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks. The purpose is to facilitate point to multi‐thousands of point communication to collect the scheduled and event data from a large number of nonmains powered endpoints that are widely dispersed. It should support low energy operation, which is necessary for multiyear battery life. Other major features are application data rate up to 40 Kb/s, thousands of endpoints per mains powered infrastructure, asymmetric application data flow, small and infrequent messages, tolerant to data latency, etc. In this paper, we present a discussion on low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks. We propose a medium access control protocol based on framed slotted aloha for these networks. We investigated probable packet sizes, energy consumptions, battery lifetime and the success rate for our protocol. The proposed protocol is simple to implement. Simulation results show that it is efficient in terms of packet success rate, energy consumption, and battery lifetime.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.