A Bidirectional Polling MAC Mechanism for IoT

Abstract

The Point Coordination Function (PCF)-based access control mechanism in IEEE 802.11 allows an access point to schedule stations in order to avoid hidden nodes and collisions. However, nearly all existing performance analysis models focus on the single-directional communication scenario, and these polling mechanisms consume a significant amount of energy resources. This study proposes a hybrid service bidirectional polling access control mechanism for transmission between an AP and N stations. To improve energy efficiency, the downlink data queue is assigned after all the uplink station queues, which allows the uplink station to sleep after it completes the data transmission, and it can remain in the sleep state until the downlink begins to broadcast. Then, a classical two-queue asymmetrical polling model is employed to analyze the performance of the PCF-based bidirectional access control system, and a Markov chain and generating function are used to derive a closed-form expression of the mean access delay for the uplink and downlink data. Simulations confirm that the proposed MAC mechanism could provide a maximum energy consumption reduction to 70% for 80 stations with respect to the limited-1 service mechanism in IEEE 802.11a PCF and the two-level polling model. Our analytical results are highly accurate for both homogeneous and heterogeneous traffic.