6TiSCH Low Latency Autonomous Scheduling for Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

With the advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), machine-to-machine communication, big-data, and the associated environment, a new model of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged. The IIoT brings sensors, intelligent machines and tools, instruments, and analytics together for applications like manufacturing, robotics, and many others. Most of these applications require adaptive and autonomous behavior, Quality of Service (QoS), efficient resource allocation, and reservation. One of these crucial challenges is to build and maintain a data communication schedule. Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) based network operation promises required QoS for low-power applications and enables high reliability. 6TiSCH layer is being developed by standardizing the protocol stack to achieve industrial performance requirements by using IPv6 over IEEE802.15.4e TSCH MAC. 6TiSCH aims to manage the schedule and configure it with the topology and traffic requirements in the industrial environment. This paper proposes a novel low latency autonomous scheduling scheme for the 6TiSCH networks. It generates a segmented schedule for the network where all source nodes can send application data packets to the root node in a single slotframe. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with existing scheduling techniques. Our scheme outperforms the other techniques. The result shows that the latency is reduced up to 41% in comparison with the other scheduling schemes. The proposed scheme has a lower radio duty cycle as the node’s ON time is reduced, making it more energy efficient and reliable.