The cost of installing a 6TiSCH schedule

Abstract

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.