Content Centric Cross-Layer Scheduling for Industrial IoT Applications Using 6TiSCH

The latest 6TiSCH standard enables highly reliable industrial monitoring and control applications through deterministic wireless communications and efficient allocation of radio resources among wireless nodes. However, much of these benefits are tied to the ability of the scheduler in orchestrating communication over individual links in an efficient and a non-conflicting manner. The state-of-the-art 6TiSCH scheduling algorithms only tackle the scheduling problem at the MAC layer with an assumption of having an optimal routing layer. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no solution so far has taken content-specific scheduling into account. This paper proposes CONCISE, which is a content-centric cross-layer scheduling solution. CONCISE creates content-independent routing topologies and schedulers, resulting in an overlaid routing structure and multiple content-based schedules. Further, CONCISE addresses in-network processing and data aggregation with the objective of reducing network traffic. Performance evaluation demonstrates that CONCISE can effectively reduce inner layer network traffic by up to 65%. As a result, it can provide up to 50% delay reduction and achieve significantly higher packet delivery ratio, compared with existing scheduling solutions. Initial proof of concept is implemented and evaluated in Contiki OS.