DeAMON: A Decentralized Adaptive Multi-Hop Scheduling Protocol for 6TiSCH Wireless Networks

The IEEE 802.15.4-2015 standard provides a link-layer mechanism, based on time synchronized channel hopping (TSCH), to enable deterministic low-power wireless mesh networking. The emerging IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH (6TiSCH) working group aims at harmonizing an IP-enabled protocol stack with the IEEE 802.15.4e link layer. In 802.15.4-TSCH medium access control, nodes follow a communication schedule; however, the standard does not specify any scheduling policy. Therefore, a number of recent studies have investigated scheduling mechanisms for 6TiSCH wireless networks. This paper introduces DeAMON, which is decentralized adaptive multi-hop scheduling protocol for 6TiSCH wireless networks. The key features of DeAMON include traffic-awareness, sequential scheduling, parallel transmissions, robust over-provisioning, and adaptability to topology changes. Moreover, DeAMON incurs minimal signaling overhead. Performance evaluation demonstrates that DeAMON outperforms state-of-the-art distributed scheduling protocols in terms of reliability, latency, and resource utilization.