A New Centralized Link Scheduling for 6TiSCH Wireless Industrial Networks

Industrial wireless sensor networks require high reliability, low power usage, and timely exchange of information. To meet these requirements, the IEEE 802.15.4e time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) medium access control (MAC) protocol was developed. The recently created IETF 6TiSCH working group (WG) is implementing a protocol stack based on the Internet of Things (IoT) standard, such as the RPL routing protocol, 6LoWPAN, and CoAP, in order to enable IPv6 on IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH. This paper presents a new Centralized Link Scheduling (CLS) algorithm for operation in 6TiSCH networks. The CLS algorithm constructs efficient multi-hop schedules using a minimal number of centralized control messages, because it allocates and deallocates slots without rescheduling the entire schedule. Simulation results show that our CLS algorithm requires smaller control messages for scheduling formation than the Decentralized Traffic Aware Scheduling (DeTAS) algorithm, implemented in 6TiSCH networks, does.