Accommodating Machine-To-Machine Traffic In IEEE 802.15.4: The Prioritized Wait Time Approach

Machine-to-Machine communication (M2M) refers to automated applications executing on smart devices or machines that communicate through a network with little or no human intervention at all. By enabling smart devices to communicate directly with one another, M2M communications technology has the potential to radically change the world around us and the way that we interact with objects. Many applications can benefit from M2M communications, such as transportation, health care, smart energy production, transmission, and distribution, logistics, city automation and manufacturing, security and safety, and others. This work describes an approach to implement M2M communications using the well-known IEEE 802.15.4 / ZigBee communications standard for low data rate wireless personal area networks. In order to achieve better performance for M2M traffic, we propose some improvements in the protocol. Our simulation results confirm the validity