PROA: Pipelined Receiver Oriented Anycast MAC for IoT

Abstract

Environmental monitoring applications for IoT networks employ small electronic devices with constrained power resources. Aiming to extend network lifetime, duty cycle is adopted as the main strategy, at the cost of increasing end-to-end latency. This article introduces PROA: a low-latency asynchronous protocol for low-power IoT. It combines medium access control (MAC) and routing functions. Some strategies are employed to overcome the duty cycle drawbacks and reduce the latency: an anycast communication pattern, a medium reservation scheme to transmit segmented data in pipelined fashion. Our protocol was compared in simulation with others from literature, achieving a latency gain greater than 30%.