Analysis of a prioritized medium access control for 2-hop machine-to-machine (M2M) communication networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions to connect a huge number of machines together to provide users with various applications. In telematics applications, end nodes send the sensory data to the relay node. The relay node then forwards the data to the edge router. When the number of end nodes in the network is very large, the relay node may encounter buffer overflow, and the end-to-end delay becomes unacceptable. The reason is that the relay node uses the same contention parameters as the end nodes to contend for the channel. In this paper, we proposed a prioritized contention mechanism so that the end-to-end delay can be minimized. An analytical model and simulation results are also presented to analyze the end-to-end delay in a 2-hop IoT network.