Clock Drift Prediction for Fast Rejoin in 802.15.4e TSCH Networks

In this paper, we propose a fast predictive resynchronization scheme that allows nodes to rejoin a 802.15.4e TSCH network with which they were previously synchronized. The idea of the scheme comes from the investigation of the internal and external root causes of the clock drift between two nodes--we have identified the causes and proposed a means for its estimation. Based on the prediction of the drift between any pair of nodes, we are able to determine the instant at which a node needs to wake up after desynchronization, thus reducing its energy consumption and the rejoin latency. We compare the proposed scheme with other state-of-the-art proposals through experiments on different hardware platforms. The experimental results show that desynchronized nodes rejoin up to 34 times faster and consume less energy by a factor of 1000 compared to the other proposals.