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A robust and resilient medium access control (MAC) protocol is crucial for numerous machine-type devices to concurrently access the channel in a machine-to-machine (M2M) network. Simplex (reservation- or contention-based) MAC protocols are studied in most literatures which may not be able to provide a scalable solution for M2M networks with large number of heterogeneous devices. In this paper, a scalable hybrid MAC protocol, which consists of a contention period and a transmission period, is designed for heterogeneous M2M networks. In this protocol, different devices with preset priorities (hierarchical contending probabilities) first contend the transmission opportunities following the convention-based -persistent carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) mechanism. Only the successful devices will be assigned a time slot for transmission following the reservation-based time-division multiple access (TDMA …