Abstract
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a medium access protocol defined in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. It has proven to be one of the most reliable options when it comes to industrial applications. TSCH offers a degree of high flexibility and can be tailored to the requirements of specific applications. Several performance aspects of TSCH have been investigated so far, such as the energy consumption, reliability, scalability and many more. However, mobility in TSCH networks remains an aspect that has not been thoroughly explored. In this paper, we examine how TSCH performs under mobility situations. We define two mobile scenarios: one where autonomous agriculture vehicles move on a predefined trail, and a warehouse logistics scenario, where autonomous robots/vehicles and workers move randomly. We examine how different TSCH scheduling approaches perform on these mobility patterns and when a different number of nodes are operating. The results show that the current TSCH scheduling approaches are not able to handle mobile scenarios efficiently. Moreover, the results provide insights on how TSCH scheduling can be improved for mobile applications.
Highlights
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which has been used broadly in the industry since it can offer a high level of reliability and robustness [1]
Application scenarios might operate in remote areas where there is no access to a cellular network [13], and protocols such as TSCH are used for local coordination
The metrics used are downtime, the energy consumption and the amount of keep alive (KA) packets (KA packets are used to update the synchronization of a node)
Summary
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which has been used broadly in the industry since it can offer a high level of reliability and robustness [1]. Application scenarios might operate in remote areas where there is no access to a cellular network [13], and protocols such as TSCH are used for local coordination These applications can be diverse in terms of mobility patterns. Other applications might operate in the context of warehouse logistics [15], where a synergy of moving machinery, autonomous robots/vehicles and workers might require low-power mobile communication to fulfill the application requirements In the latter case, the mobility pattern is more random than the former, and the performance of a protocol, such as TSCH, would be different. We consider two mobile scenarios, and based on the simulations, we evaluate three different schedulers to examine the reliability of TSCH.
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