TSCH Evaluation under heterogeneous Mobile Scenarios

Abstract: Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a medium access protocol defined in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. It has been demonstrated to be one of the most reliable options when it comes to industrial applications. TSCH offers a degree of large flexibility and can be tailored to the requirements of specific applications. Several performance aspects of TSCH have been investigated so far, such as the energy consumption, the reliability, scalability and many more. However, mobility in TSCH networks remains an aspect that has not been thoroughly explored. In this paper we examine how TSCH performs under mobility situations. We define two mobile scenarios: one where autonomous agriculture vehicles move on a predefined trail, and a warehouse logistics scenario, where autonomous robots/vehicles and workers move randomly. We examine how different TSCH scheduling approaches perform on these mobility patterns and when different number of nodes are operating. The results show that the current TSCH scheduling approaches are not able to handle mobile scenarios efficiently. Moreover, the results provide insights on how TSCH scheduling can be improved for mobile applications.