Dynamic Programming based Low-Latency Schedule (DPLLS) for 6TiSCH networks

Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological concept bringing sustainability and sophistication to our lives and is a significant component of Industry 4.0. The main requirements of Industrial IoT are reliability, stringent latency and energy efficiency. The IEEE 802.15.4e standard has adapted a Medium Access Control (MAC) behavioural mode called Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) to address the requirements of Industry 4.0. The 6TiSCH (IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH) protocol stack enables us to schedule the transmissions in TSCH network to achieve application-specific guarantees. In this paper, we propose DPLLS, a conflict-free dynamic programming based low-latency scheduling algorithm for TSCH network. In particular, identifying non-interfering transmissions in the network is posed as a maximum weight independent set (MWIS) problem, which is solved using a dynamic programming method. We organise each slotframe into smaller parts called blocks in which the non-interfering transmissions are scheduled simultaneously using either a conservative or a greedy scheme. The blocks are repeated in a slotframe to accommodate the retransmissions of packets to ensure reliability and minimise the latency. The proposed scheme is evaluated using an example to find the suitable block length of the proposed schemes and compared with the existing scheduling algorithms.