Analysis of priority arbitration in low-rate CSMA/CA-basedrndifferentiated access with throughput optimization

摘要

A class of applications, such as home energy management and control and utility data acquisition, is emerging in recent times where smart meters, sensors, and appliances are networked together for intelligent management and coordination. Such applications rely on low data rate communication of monitoring and control information at large scale. For the underlying networking infrastructure to facilitate communication of the real-time and intermittent packet traffic expected, random access-based protocols are regarded as suitable medium access control solutions. A key challenge in this regard is that the random access protocols are prone to throughput degradation when the number of contending nodes grows, as expected with the infrastructures involved. Besides, provision for certain degree of criticality/priority is needed for some of the packets compared with the rest. With this background, this paper analytically determines the criterion for throughput-optimal operations in a network based on low-rate carrier sense multiple access protocol. In addition, ways to provide priority-wise access differentiation at arbitrary proportions without a negative impact on the achievable throughput is incorporated within a binary exponential backoff-based collision avoidance scheme. Discrete-event simulations are performed to validate the accuracy of the approximations made in analysis. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.