DeSSR: a Decentralized, Broadcast-Based Scalable Scheduling Reservation Protocol for 6TiSCH Networks

Abstract

The emergence of IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) for low-power wireless communication is considered a breakthrough allowing a densely populated multi-hop network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be used for data gathering over a range of 1-2 kilometer (km). However, the communication between the devices has suffered from external interferences and multi-path fading challenge. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) jointly proposed The IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH mode (6TiSCH) to deal with existing challenges and improve network performance to meet key requirements of industrial applications. The 6Top layer integrates TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping)-MAC over IEEE 802.15.4 with the rest of the IPv6 stack where the schedule allocation is performed by scheduling function (SF). However, network scalability remains an open challenge. Specifically, the 6TiSCH Working Group (WG) do not define rules towards optimal schedule allocation over Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4. In this paper, we propose Decentralized, and Broadcast-based Scalable Scheduling Reservation Protocol for 6TiSCH Networks (DeSSR). The experimental performance analysis demonstrates strong performance under steady and bursty traffic when compared with current SFs. This makes DeSSR a strong proposal contributing towards improving scalability in large-scale 6TiSCH networks.