View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC 1 Goodbye, ALOHA! A. Laya∗, C. Kalalasz, F. Vazquez-Gallegoz, L. Alonsoy and J. Alonso-Zaratez ∗KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. e-mail:
[email protected] yUniversitat Politecnica` de Catalunya (UPC), Spain. e-mail:
[email protected] zCentre Tecnologic` de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Spain. e-mail: fckalalas, francisco.vazquez,
[email protected] Abstract The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday objects and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., Carrier Sensing Multiple Access (CSMA). These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on Distributed Queueing (DQ) which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern.