6TiSCH-Sim: An Efficient Simulator and Cell Scheduling Scheme for 6TiSCH Industrial IoT Networks

The 6TiSCH (IPv6 over Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4e) wireless protocol is designed to offer high-throughput, low and bounded latency, energy efficient, and reliable communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, scheduling the data transmission cells among the IoT nodes for exchanging sensory data is not trivial in 6TiSCH networks when the network traffic is highly dynamic and unpredictable. We observed that the existing schemes on cell scheduling encounter very low cell utilization i.e., the ratio of used cells and allocated cells, thus leading to the high energy consumption of the nodes. To deal with this problem, we propose an Efficient Cell Scheduling Scheme (ECSS), which considers both cell utilization and buffer availability of the nodes while scheduling cells, unlike the existing schemes. We also developed a 6TiSCH Cell Scheduling Simulator (6TiSCH-Sim) to simulate nodes' behavior during cell scheduling, unlike the existing time-taking simulators. We validate the efficiency of ECSS in terms of cell utilization, nodes' energy consumption, and their packet drops by comparing it with the recent existing cell scheduling schemes on large-scale 6TiSCH networks. Simulation results show that ECSS significantly improved the performance of large 6TiSCH networks compared to the existing schemes in terms of energy consumption and packet drops.