Distributed cell selection for scheduling function in 6TiSCH networks

Recently, the new IETF 6TiSCH Working Group (WG) was created to enable the IPv6 over the deterministic Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of the 802.15.4e standard for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Due to the dynamic nature of the target network environment, the 6TiSCH WG is now calling for an efficient distributed scheduling through a Scheduling Function in which the neighbor nodes negotiate with one another to add/delete cells to satisfy the bandwidth requirement. A Scheduling Function consists of the following two main points: when a node should add/delete one or more cells to its neighbor, and the cells that should be selected. Although several Scheduling Function studies have been conducted, the primary focus of the current works is the first point, while the optimal selection method regarding the cells remains an unresolved issue. In this paper, a reliable distributed cell-selection mechanism for the Scheduling Function in the 6TiSCH networks is proposed. The simulation and experiment results show that the proposed mechanism helps in the reductions of the negotiation-error ratio, the number of colliding cells and the signaling overhead compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.