ECTS: Enhanced Centralized TSCH Scheduling with Packet Aggregation for Industrial IoT

The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a lot of momentum thanks to the introduction of Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) in IEEE 802.15.4. At last, we can enjoy collision-free, low-latency wireless communication in challenging environments. Nevertheless, the fixed size of time slots in TSCH provides an opportunity for further enhancements. In this paper, we propose an enhanced centralized TSCH scheduling (ECTS) algorithm with simple packet aggregation while collecting data over a tree topology. Having in mind that the payload of a sensor node is rather short, we attempt to put more than one payload in one packet. Thus, we occupy just one cell to forward them. We investigated the schedule compactness of ECTS in Matlab, and we evaluated its operation, after implementing it in Contiki-NG, using Cooja. Our results show that ECTS with packet aggregation outperforms TASA in terms of slotframe duration and imposes fairness among the nodes in terms of latency. A validation exercise using real motes confirms its successful operation in real deployments.