Design and Performance Evaluation of a Hysteresis-Free On-the-Fly Scheduling Function for 6TiSCH

This article presents the design and performance evaluation of a hysteresis-free on-the-fly (HF-OTF) scheduling function for the Internet protocol version 6 over the time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4 based Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. The proposed HF-OTF scheduling function tackles the problem of determining the amount of network resources (i.e., timeslots and frequency channels) a node needs to request from its preferred parent node. Unlike the conventional OTF scheduling function, the proposed algorithm can determine the required bandwidth without the configuration of a hysteresis quantum. The performance evaluation of HF-OTF scheduling function shows that, under bursty traffic in a TSCH-based IoT mesh network, the proposed HF-OTF outperforms the conventional on-the-fly (OTF) and the enhanced OTF (E-OTF) with optimal hysteresis quantum settings. Specifically, the HF-OTF achieves an end-to-end packet delivery ratio 23% and 34% higher than that of the E-OTF and the conventional OTF, respectively. For the end-to-end latency performance metric, the HF-OTF exhibits an end-to-end latency that is 4% and 24% lower than that of the E-OTF and conventional OTF, respectively.