A Proposed Resource-Aware Time-Constrained Scheduling Mechanism for DSME based IoV Networks

The new era of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications is driving the evolution of conventional Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In the IoV networks, vehicles and the embedded sensory devices are the smart objects that are connected with other similar smart/IoT devices for data sharing and communication. The current specification of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard supports IoV/IoT application-specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Specifically, the Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME) MAC mode facilitates stringent latency and throughput performance through the use of DSME-Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) allocation between two communicating devices. However, the standard does not explore DSME-GTS scheduling across the available channels, thereby making it an active research issue. This paper addresses the problem of DSME-GTS scheduling by proposing a distributed scheduling mechanism incurring minimal network overhead. The main challenge is to optimally use the available resources (channels and timeslots) and adhere to different flow deadlines. The proposed scheduling mechanism considers a 2-hop collision domain for channel assignment, and number of child devices for DSME-GTS allocations. The proposed scheduling mechanism's performance evaluation shows its efficiency in terms of energy consumption, transmission overhead, and channel utilization compared to other closely related schemes.