Competition: Reliability through Timeslotted Channel Hopping and Flooding-based Routing

The recent IEEE802.15.4e-2012 standard proposes medium access variants for improving the efficiency of lowpower and lossy networks. The Timeslotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode enables wireless networks that can support applications with high-reliability requirements, such as smart factories, process automation and smart buildings. In TSCH-based networks, time is sliced into time slots and channel hopping is used to combat external interference and multi-path fading. The IETF 6TiSCH working group currently standardizes different scheduling approaches and what routing protocol to use. OpenWSN is the de-facto opensource implementation of TSCH/6TiSCH. We propose to participate in the EWSN Dependability Competition by utilizing a modified version of OpenWSN in which we employ controlled flooding as a routing protocol. We believe the channel hopping nature of IEEE802.15.4e TSCH will yield high reliability, and controlled flooding will yield low latency and resilience to topological changes. Lessons learnt from participating in the competition will be fed back to the IETF 6TiSCH standardization group; the code developed will be contributed to the OpenWSN opensource project (www.openwsn.org).