Enhanced time-slotted channel hopping

With the development of technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of mobile, intelligent sensors are being connected to the Internet. The IoT is a heterogeneous environment. In industrial environments, wireless technologies coexist on the same frequency and generate different kinds of traffic. The use of different wireless technologies that are not designed to be compatible with each other causes an external interference problem, which degrades the system performance. The medium access control (MAC) sublayer protocols must be carefully designed to overcome such a problem. The time-slotted channel-hopping (TSCH) mode, which is dedicated for industrial applications, can mitigate such a problem because it uses the channel-hopping technique. Because these channels are subjected to different levels of interference, this may greatly degrade the system performance when wireless sensors with mobility devices hop blindly from one channel to another. This paper improves the reliability of communications of the TSCH MAC sublayer protocol, proposed by the IEEE 802.15.4e standard, in wireless sensor networks, by applying a new, dynamic blacklisting technique. The technique selects and uses only high-quality channels and blacklists those with low quality. The proposed solution has been simulated using Network Simulator 3. The results show significant improvements in terms of throughput, energy, and reliability.