Energy-aware MAC techniques for low-power massive IoT

Efficient multiple access remains a key challenge for emerging IoT networks comprising a large set of devices with sporadic activation, thus motivating significant research in the last few years. The interest has been mostly in grant-free protocols for three main reasons: they promote efficient spectrum utilisation as each device is not assigned a dedicated transmission resource block, incur limited signalling overhead, and support energy efficient operations. At the MAC layer, the aim is to reduce collisions using ALOHA-like and modern random-access protocols; while concurrent transmissions in a given resource block may be resolved at the PHY layer. This research proposes a new age- and energy-dependent multiple access protocol to be applied to massive IoT networks. The goal is to ensure the freshness of the exchanged information, energy efficiency, and scalability.