Medium Access Control Protocol for High Altitude Platform Based Massive Machine Type Communication

Abstract

Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) can be used to connect a large number of sensors over a wide coverage area. One of the places where mMTC can be applied is in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A WSN consists of several sensor nodes that send their sensing information to the cluster head (CH), which can then be forwarded to a high altitude platform (HAP) station. Sensing information can be sent by the sensor nodes at the same time through the same medium, which means collision can occur. When this happens, the sensor node must re-send the sensing information, which causes energy wastage in the WSN. In this paper, we propose a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to control access from several sensor nodes during data transmission to avoid collision. The sensor nodes send Round Robin, Interrupt and Query data every eight hours. The initial slot for transmission of the Round Robin data can be either randomized or reserved. Analysis performance was done to see the efficiency of the network with the proposed MAC protocol. Based on the series of simulations that was conducted, the proposed MAC protocol can support a WSN system-based HAP for monitoring every eight hours. The proposed MAC protocol with an initial slot that is reserved for transmission of Round Robin data has greater network efficiency than a randomized slot.