The Cost of Installing a 6TiSCH Schedule

Erwan Livolant (1) , Pascale Minet (1) , Thomas Watteyne (1)

1 EVA - Wireless Networking for Evolving & Adaptive Applications

Scheduling in an IEEE802.15.4e TSCH (6TiSCH) low-power wireless mesh network can be done in a centralized or distributed way. When using centralized scheduling, a scheduler computes a communication schedule, which then needs to be installed into the network. This can be done using standards such CoAP and CoMI, or using a custom protocol such as OCARI. In this paper, we compute the number of messages installing and updating the schedule takes, using both approaches, on a realistic example scenario. The cost of using today's standards is high. In some cases, a standards-based solution requires approximately 4 times more messages to be transmitted in the network, than when using a custom protocol. This paper makes three simple recommended changes to the standards which, when integrated, reduce the cost of a standards based solution by 18% to 74%. Since they are still being developed, these recommendations can easily be integrated into the standards.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Erwan Livolant, Pascale Minet, Thomas Watteyne. The Cost of Installing a 6TiSCH Schedule. AdHoc-Now 2016 - International Conference on Ad Hoc Networks and Wireless , Jul 2016, Lille, France. ⟨hal-01302966⟩