Decentralized Traffic Aware Scheduling in 6TiSCH Networks: Design and Experimental Evaluation

Abstract—This paper capitalizes on two emerging trends, i.e. the growing use of wireless at the edge of industrial control networks and the growing interest to integrate IP into said networks. This is facilitated by recent design contributions from the IEEE and the IETF, where the former developed a highly efficient deterministic time-frequency scheduled medium access control protocol in form of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH and the latter IPv6 networking paradigms in form of 6LoWPAN/ROLL, and scheduling approaches in form of 6TiSCH. The focus of the present work is on advancing the state of the art of deterministic 6TiSCH schedules towards more flexible but equally reliable distributed approaches. In addition, this paper aims to introduce the first implementation of 6TiSCH networks for factory automation environments: it outlines the challenges faced to overcome the scalability issues inherent to multi-hop dense low-power networks; the experimental results confirm that the naturally unreliable radio medium can support time-critical and reliable applications. These developments pave the way for wireless industry-grade monitoring approaches. Index Terms—6TiSCH, IEEE 802.15.4e, scheduling algorithms, Timeslotted Channel Hoppin