Energy consumption analysis of TSCH-enabled platforms for the Industrial-IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is emerging as a new communication paradigm for a class of low-power wireless networks used in critical applications, such as industrial process monitoring and automation. While these networks are receiving significant attention from standardization bodies, a lightweight protocol stack, built on top of the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) technology, is now available. IIoT devices are usually energy-constrained. Thus, the worldwide scientific community is spending a lot of efforts in designing new energy-saving communication protocols for TSCH-enabled networks. Nevertheless, even if the energy consumption is mainly due to radio communications, transmission of unneeded data, protocol overhead, and non-optimized communication patterns, the implementation of the IIoT protocol suite in real platforms may introduce a further and unpleasant waste of energy. The aim of this work is to experimentally measure the energy consumption of TSCH-enabled platforms (specifically TelosB motes) under different system configurations. The two investigated operating systems are OpenWSN and Contiki. Obtained results will demonstrate that OpenWSN always registers a lower energy consumption, thus emerging as a promising protocol implementation for upcoming energy-efficient IIoT systems.