Performance Evaluation of Adaptive Autonomous Scheduling Functions for 6TiSCH Networks

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has recently defined the 6TiSCH architecture to enable the <italic>Industrial Internet of Things</italic> (IIoT), i.e., the adoption of the IoT paradigm for industrial applications with stringent requirements, in terms of reliability and timelin...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Francesca Righetti, Carlo Vallati, Arianna Gavioli, Giuseppe Anastasi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9536697/
Description
Summary:The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has recently defined the 6TiSCH architecture to enable the <italic>Industrial Internet of Things</italic> (IIoT), i.e., the adoption of the IoT paradigm for industrial applications with stringent requirements, in terms of reliability and timeliness. In 6TiSCH networks, the scheduling of communication resources is of paramount importance to meet the application requirements, and many different <italic>Scheduling Functions</italic> have been proposed to cope with the needs of various applications. Recently, autonomous scheduling has emerged as an efficient and robust approach, as it allows nodes to allocate communication resources <italic>autonomously</italic>, i.e., without any negotiation with their neighbors, thus avoiding the related overhead. Typically, this is obtained through <italic>static</italic> resource-allocation algorithms that are not able to adapt to variations in traffic conditions. In this paper, we consider <italic>adaptive autonomous scheduling</italic>, and compare the performance of three different algorithms in various IIoT scenarios. We investigate their ability to adapt to traffic changes, and evaluate them in terms of performance, resource consumption, and complexity. Based on the results obtained, we also provide a set of guidelines to select the most appropriate Scheduling Function, and its configuration parameters, depending on the specific use case.
ISSN:2169-3536