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Machine-to-machine (M2M) devices can transmit data perfectly with absolutely no or minimal human intervention and is really considered as the support for Internet of things (Chen, et al., 2012). M2M networks are involved in small-scale private domain like smart healthcare and smart homes, intermediate-scale public domain like smart cities and smart power grids and large-scale industrial domain namely smart industrial automations (Chen et al., 2014). It is simple to deploy as well as operate, and it functions with both wired and wireless networks indoors and out. It has a larger variety, lower latency, faster bandwidth, and requires less energy. It allows smart gadgets to communicate without the need for human interaction. The machine-to-machine technique's primary goal is to collect sensing information and transmit it to a system. M2M technologies, including SCADA or other telemonitoring programs, frequently employ wireless internet as well as networking protocols. With wide-spread applications, distinct characteristics of the networks can be easily distinguished and projected for M2M communication such as different traffic types; frequent variations of traffic loads; numerous connected devices and so on. When these characteristics are combined, M2M network is probably considered as ‘heterogeneous’ (Rajandekar et al., 2015). For example, coexistence of non-critical as well as time-critical traffic or spontaneous and burst traffics arise at once. Such heterogeneity network face new set of challenges and are also complex, particularly when the channel resources are shared in an orderly and effective way (Alonso-Zarate et al., 2008). Thus, when the density of the given node in an M2M heterogeneous network is high, it is appropriate to develop and implement an effective channel sharing approach. Traditional standalone MAC protocols like carrier sensing multiple access (CSMA) and time division multiple access (TDMA), are not applied in M2M networks directly as they have no ability to deal with heterogeneity (Antonopoulos et al., 2013; Alvi et al., 2016; Ramasamy et al., 2017). While transferring any information, Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) responds to or detects network transmissions on the carrier/medium. CSMA is used in Network switches that have several computers or wireless routers connected to them. Whereas digital modulation is a mechanism for allocating a specified amount of wideband to every customer in order to allow for several concurrent talks. Every user is given a designated broadcast time slot. TDMA outperforms analog devices in terms of spectrum efficiency. CSMA produces high collision and comparatively high overhead (e.g., CSMA/CA) when traffic loads are high and when low, low channel usage as well as low scalability are offered by TDMA (Liao et al., 2015). When the benefits of these protocols, their weaknesses are reduced and leads to investigate the hybrid MAC protocol (Teng et al., 2017; Alvi et al., 2015).
Figure 1.
Generic Machine to Machine architecture