Bandwidth-Efficient Media Access Protocol for Wireless Feedback Control in Home Energy Networks

Home energy networks require the integration of networked sensing with networked control for energy monitoring and management. Shared communication media for sensing and control is easy to be configured but introduces the delay and packet loss. This paper studies the Media Access Control (MAC) layer support of reliable wireless feedback control and flexible sensing in home networks. We discuss the problem of large bandwidth requirement of reliable feedback control in the limited bandwidth of the shared network media. We propose a dynamic bandwidth assignment approach that fits the reliability requirement of feedback control and enables a high bandwidth utilization to solve the problem. The simulation results reveal that FCMA can achieve high bandwidth efficiency with low packet losses.