An Empirical Survey of Autonomous Scheduling Methods for TSCH

Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a link layer protocol defined in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Although it is designed to provide highly reliable and efficient service targeting industrial automation systems, scheduling TSCH transmissions in the time and frequency dimensions is left to the implementers. We evaluate the performance of existing autonomous scheduling approaches for TSCH on various traffic patterns and network configurations. We thoroughly investigate the pros and cons of each scheme; moreover, we propose the use of node based channel allocation to improve the performance of the best scheme, and demonstrate its practicality and reliability, with up to 6 percentage points better packet delivery ratio than the second best option while retaining a similar radio duty cycle. Finally, based on our extensive performance evaluation, we provide some guidelines on how to select a scheduler for a given network.