Efficient multi-receiver message aggregation for short message delivery in M2M networks

In wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks, how to efficiently and reliably deliver short, periodic message to a large number of receivers is an important, challenging issue. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) is a promising technique to provide the reliable communications. However, ARQ affects the transmission efficiency by retransmitting the whole packet even though partial packet has been received successfully. Such effect can be more serious when delivering messages to a large number of receivers. In this paper, we propose a new multireceiver message aggregation (MRMA) scheme and a busy-tone negative acknowledgement (BT-NACK) scheme to jointly improve the communication efficiency and reliability. To further optimize the performance, an integer programming problem is formulated to explore the optimal aggregation configuration. While it is NP-hard to find a global optimal solution, low complexity heuristic algorithms are developed. Simulation results show that our schemes significantly improve the communication efficiency and communication delay.