Experimental Analysis of the Efficiency of Shared Access in IEEE802.15.4-TSCH Networks with Sporadic Traffic

Industrial wireless networks are now used in many applications, and require to fulfill a certain set of requirements to operate properly. IEEE802.15.4-TSCH is considered a suitable solution to provide real time multihop transmissions in noisy and harsh environments. The standard relies on a strict schedule of the transmissions to reduce the radio duty cycle ratio. While constructing a schedule for periodic traffic has been widely studied in the past, we focus here on the aperiodic, sporadic case. We have to multiplex the transmissions in the schedule to reduce the energy consumption while limiting the number of collisions to provide still high reliability. We propose here to study experimentally the performance of TSCH with shared access and bursty arrivals. Then, we demonstrate how to re-adapt the scheduler to better deal with unpredictable traffic. By performing experiments, we can predict the optimal number of transmitters in a shared cell. Thus, we can overcome collisions and packets drops in complex scenarios where bursty traffic is required.