Scheduling of Dedicated and Shared Links for Fast and Reliable Data Delivery in IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH Networks

Many industrial Internet of Things scenarios require reliable delivery of time-sensitive information send by a high number of devices. A promising technology for such massive machine-type low-latency communications is the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) operation mode of IEEE 802.15.4. This operation mode allows to schedule both dedicated channel resource units for collision-free transmission and shared channel resource units for random channel access. While numerous existing studies consider either scheduling of dedicated resource units or transmission in the shared ones, the joint usage of both dedicated and shared resource units has not been investigated yet. We fill this gap. We propose two approaches to joint scheduling of shared and dedicated channel resource units and analyze the performance of these approaches in terms of the packet loss ratio taking into account the channel noise. Apart from that, we propose modifications to the standard channel access rules and analyze their performance using an extensive simulation. We show that the proposed approaches with modified channel access rules give extremely low packet loss ratio with respect to the default behavior.