YSF: A 6TiSCH Scheduling Function Minimizing Latency of Data Gathering in IIoT

Abstract

Data gathering systems in the Industrial IoT require an end-to-end latency as low as 1 s with coverage of a few hundred meters. The 6TiSCH standard is well suited for these types of applications. A 6TiSCH network is a multihop wireless IPv6 network which uses time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH). TSCH is a medium access mode of IEEE802.15.4 which pro- vides deterministic properties, and increases robustness against external interference and multipath fading. A key component of TSCH is its scheduling function that builds the communication schedule, which greatly impacts network performance. Although there are several proposed TSCH scheduling solutions in the lit- erature, most of them are not directly applicable to 6TiSCH for real-world deployments because they fail to take into consider- ation the dynamics of a network. Some of them assume a fixed routing topology, which does not match 6TiSCH where the rout- ing topology dynamically changes with the radio environment. In this article, we propose a full-featured 6TiSCH scheduling func- tion called YSF, that autonomously takes into account all aspects of network dynamics, including the network formation phase and parent switching. YSF aims at minimizing latency and maximiz- ing reliability for data gathering applications. We evaluate YSF by simulation, and compare it to MSF, the state-of-art schedul- ing function being standardized by the IETF 6TiSCH working group.

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