Adaptive guard time for energy-efficient IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH networks

Abstract

Several Internet of Things (IoT) applications have strict performance requirements, in terms of reliability and power consumption. IEEE 802.15.4 Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a recently standardised Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that supports these requirements by keeping the nodes time-synchronised. In order to ensure successful communication between a sender and a receiver, the latter starts listening shortly before the expected frame’s arrival. This time offset is called guard time and it aims to reduce the probability of missed frames due to clock drift. This paper investigates the impact of the guard time on the energy consumption and proposes a scheme for the decentralised adaptation of the guard time in each node depending on its hop-distance from the sink. Simulations and test-bed experiments demonstrate that guard time adaptation can reduce the energy consumption by up to 50%, without compromising the reliability of the network.