Abstract
The development of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Internet of Things should consider various aspects such as energy saving, scalability for a wide number of nodes, and grouping awareness. Although numerous protocols consider these aspects in the limited view of handling the medium access, the proposed Grouping MAC (GMAC) exploits prior knowledge of geographic node distribution in the environment and their priority levels. Such awareness enables GMAC to significantly reduce the number of collisions and prolong the network lifetime. GMAC is developed on the basis of five cycles that manage data transmission between sensors and cluster head and between cluster head and sink. These two stages of communication increase the efficiency of energy consumption for transmitting packets. In addition, GMAC contains slot decomposition and assignment based on node priority, and, therefore, is a grouping-aware protocol. Compared with standard benchmarks IEEE 802.15.4 and industrial automation standard 100.11a and user-defined grouping, GMAC protocols generate a Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) higher than 90%, whereas the PDR of benchmark is as low as 75% in some scenarios and 30% in others. In addition, the GMAC accomplishes lower end-to-end (e2e) delay than the least e2e delay of IEEE with a difference of 3 s. Regarding energy consumption, the consumed energy is 28.1 W/h for GMAC-IEEE Energy Aware (EA) and GMAC-IEEE, which is less than that for IEEE 802.15.4 (578 W/h) in certain scenarios.