Priority Based Centralized Scheduling for Time Slotted Channel Hopping Based Multihop IEEE 802.15.4 Networks

To meet the growing demands of low power and determinism in Industrial Wireless applications, IEEE defined IEEE 802.15.4e amendment that includes many channel access methods. Time Slotted Channel Hopping protocol is one of the most popular MAC protocols under IEEE 802.15.4e. However, scheduling of time slots for time slotted channel hopping, was not part of the protocol and so different scheduling algorithms were proposed by researchers. A new time slotted channel hopping scheduling mechanism that considers priorities to meet the time critical industrial applications is proposed in this work. Latency improvements of about 40 percentage are obtained here, for slot allocations to higher priority devices, when compared with the conventional queuing methods.