Design Considerations of Self-Adaptive Wireless M2M Network Communication Architecture

For the existing heterogeneous wireless M2M network architectures, different data link layers lack a common structure. In this paper, the concept of attribute assembly layer has been proposed, and an adaptive architecture for wireless M2M network has been built, based on the hierarchical heterogeneous modeling of Ptolemy II. Finally, saturated and unsaturated conditions network experiments have been designed in the part of system test. Experimental results show that this architecture has a low memory occupation and less time cost. It unifies the data link layers for heterogeneous networks and is compatible well with the existing platforms, communication protocols, and network mechanisms. The self-adaptive network has more connected sets. The proposed architecture has good adaptive capacity and it can apply to potential communication protocols. 1. Introduction With the rapid development of wireless communication technology and wireless M2M networks, there emerge lots of typical wireless communication technologies, mainly including 3G [1] based wireless WAN, IEEE802.16 [2] based wireless MAN [3], IEEE802.11 [4] based wireless LAN [5], wireless PAN based on IEEE802.15 [6] and blue tooth technique [7], ad hoc networks [8], sensor networks [9], wireless mesh networks [10], NGEO satellite mobile communications [11], and vehicle area networks [12]. For the diversity of existing wireless communication technology, applications and protocols of the wireless network would run over different link layers and data transferring also cannot depend on the same link-layer mechanism. Therefore, we need to consider, over the existing communication protocol architecture for wireless M2M network, if there is a mechanism independent of link layers to develop applications and protocols. Communication protocol architecture with common operability has a good code reuse and it can meet the needs of compatibility, interoperability, and scalability for the link layer. Thus, such architecture has a great advantage in the development for wireless M2M network. Many organizations associated with M2M network have put forward various communication protocol architectures for heterogeneous networks. For instance, for the heterogeneous network composed of UMTS and WLAN, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute has defined two kinds of fusion structure, namely, the loosely coupled one [13] and the tightly coupled one [14]. The loosely coupled structure is a research focus at present [15], while the tightly coupled one is rarely applied in actual projects, which is due to the high