LDSF: Low-Latency Distributed Scheduling Function for Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is expected to be a key enabler for the Industry 4.0. However, networked control automation often requires high reliability and bounded latency to react properly. Thus, modern wireless protocols for industrial networks, such as IEEE 802.15.4-2015 time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH), rely on a strict schedule of the transmissions to avoid collisions and to make the end-to-end traffic deterministic. Unfortunately, guaranteeing a bounded end-to-end latency is particularly challenging since transmissions have to be temporally chained. Even worse, potential degradation of the link quality may result in reconstructing the whole TSCH schedule along the path. In this article, we propose the low-latency distributed scheduling function (LDSF) that relies on the organization of the slotframe in smaller parts, called blocks. Each transmitter selects the right set of blocks, depending on its hop distance from the border router, so that retransmission opportunities are automatically scheduled. To save energy, a node can still turn off its radio as soon as its packet is correctly acknowledged. Our mathematical analysis as well as our simulation evaluation show the efficiency of the proposed LDSF algorithm compared to three state-of-the-art scheduling functions (SFs): 1) the minimal SF (MSF); 2) low-latency SF (LLSF); and 3) stratum.