Guard time optimisation and adaptation for energy efficient multi-hop TSCH networks

In the IEEE 802.15.4-2015 standard, Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) aims to guarantee high-level network reliability by keeping nodes time-synchronised. In order to ensure successful communication between a sender and a receiver, the latter starts listening shortly before the expected time of a MAC layer frame’s arrival. The offset between the time a node starts listening and the estimated time of frame arrival is called guard time and it aims to reduce the probability of missed frames due to clock drift. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the guard time on network performance. We identify that, when using the 6tisch minimal schedule, the most significant cause of energy consumption is idle listening during guard time. Therefore, we first perform mathematical modelling on a TSCH link to identify the guard time that maximises the energy-efficiency of the TSCH network in single hop topology. We then continue in multi-hop network, where we empirically adapt the guard time locally at each node depending its distance, in terms of hops, from the sink. Our performance evaluation results, conducted using the Contiki OS, demonstrate that the proposed decentralised guard time adaptation can reduce the energy consumption by up to 40%, without compromising network reliability.