DeSSR: A Decentralized, Broadcast-Based Scalable Scheduling Reservation Protocol for 6TiSCH Networks

The emergence of Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) for low-power wireless communication is considered a breakthrough allowing a densely populated multihop network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be used for data gathering over a range of 1–2 km. However, the communication between the devices has suffered from external interferences and multipath fading challenge. The Internet engineering task force (IETF) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) jointly proposed The IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH mode (6TiSCH) to deal with existing challenges and improve network performance to meet the key requirements of industrial applications. The 6Top layer integrates time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH)-MAC over IEEE 802.15.4 with the rest of the IPv6 stack where the schedule allocation is performed by the scheduling function (SF). However, network scalability remains an open challenge. Specifically, the 6TiSCH working group (WG) do not define rules toward optimal schedule allocation over TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4. In this article, we propose a decentralized, and broadcast-based scalable scheduling reservation protocol for 6TiSCH Networks (DeSSR). The experimental performance analysis demonstrates strong performance under steady and bursty traffic when compared with current SFs. This makes DeSSR a strong proposal contributing toward improving scalability in large-scale 6TiSCH networks.