MoT: A Deterministic Latency MAC Protocol for Mission-Critical IoT Applications

With the growing demand on the IoT market and limited wireless resources, it is essential to fully utilize the available spectrum by improving the total throughput of the network. Many MAC protocols for IoT rely on pure ALOHA-based channel access. Being that these are contention-based the packet collisions cause a massive drop in both the throughput and packet d elivery ratio. The se, proto cols a re unsuitable formission-critical applications which usually req uire long-range communication with guaranteed packet delivery and high throughput. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid scheduling-based protocol MAC on Time (MoT) that guarantees the delivery of all uplink packets in the network and addresses mos t of the importantparameters re qui red by mission-critical a pplica tio.MoT improves the utilization of the bandwidth ca pacity while providing deterministic latency and increased throughput when compared to other IoT MAC protocols. We then designed a simulator for MoT to allow us to compare its performance against that of LoRaWAN. This work provides valuable insight on the performance of both protocols and will aid future research.