Resource Allocation is All You Need: The Routing and Scheduling Problem in 6TiSCH Networks

Deterministic Wireless Sensor Networks over IEEE 802.15.4 can provide latency-bounded transmission of flows, which is an important enabler for current and future Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. To realise such networks, a viable routing and scheduling solution must be found that can accept all given flows and maintain their latency requirements. The joint routing and scheduling (JRaS) problem promises optimal routing and scheduling decisions-however, at the expense of very high computation times. To overcome this issue, we propose efficient modifications to the separate routing and scheduling problems, such that we can obtain a success rate similar to the optimal JRaS approach. However, our solutions can be found in much less time. We conduct extensive performance evaluations for different problem complexities and found a speedup in the range of 3.03× up to 6.09× compared to JRaS while having almost no statistical difference in success rates.