DeTAS: a Decentralized Traffic Aware Scheduling technique enabling IoT-compliant Multi-hop Low-power and Lossy Networks

The emerging IEEE802.15.4e standard and IETF RPL routing protocol provide key functionalities useful for a really viable Internet of Things. Indeed, they are core to the organization of multi-hop Low-power and Lossy Networks. Nevertheless, the design of effective scheduling schemes in such systems is one of the major problems, which requires research efforts in order to be solved. Actually, there are no specifications about how schedules should be realized. Trying to fill this gap, the aim of this paper is twofold. First of all, we present a new Decentralized Traffic-Aware Scheduling algorithm, which is able to construct optimum multi-hop schedules in a distributed fashion. Secondly, we prove its effectiveness by means of simulation results, and we compare such descentralized solution with a centralized one. The reported performance results encourage the use of such decentralized scheme, since it allows a very efficient queue management, while minimizing the network duty cycle as well.