Scheduling for IEEE802.15.4-TSCH and slow channel hopping MAC in low power industrial wireless networks: A survey

The so-called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is expected to transform our world, and in depth modernize very different domains such as manufacturing, energy, agriculture, construction industry, and other industrial sectors. The need for low power radio networks first led to low duty cycle approaches where nodes turn off their radio chipset most of the time to save energy. The medium access control (MAC) has thus been largely investigated over the last fifteen years. Unfortunately, classical contention access methods use a random access and are unable to provide guarantees. In the meantime, some dedicated standards have emerged (e.g. IEEE 802.15.4-2006, IEEE 802.15.4-2015), combining Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) with slow channel hopping in order to enable reliability and energy efficiency. Slow channel hopping allows each node to use different channels for a frame and its possible retransmissions with a low-cost hardware. To provide high-reliability, these protocols rely on a common schedule in order to prevent simultaneously interfering transmissions. In this context, we clearly observe a strong growth of the number of proposals in the last years, denoting a strong interest of the research community for deterministic slow channel hopping scheduling for the IIoT. We categorize here the numerous existing solutions according to their objectives (e.g. high-reliability, mobility support) and approaches. We also identify some open challenges, expected to attract much attention over the next few years.