A distributed mechanism for cell scheduling to reduce funneling effect in 802.15.4e-based wireless networks

The IEEE 802.15.4e standard was proposed to improve the reliability of data transmission at the MAC layer for low power and lossy networks such as wireless sensor networks. The possibility of using multiple non-overlapping channels decreases the probability of collision among cometiting nodes, which, in turn, results in improving the quality of service as well as reducing energy consumption. The TSCH mechanism permits scheduling each data transmission on a pair of channel/timeslot using frequency hopping. However, the standard does not specify how to allocate channel/timeslot for scheduling data transmissions .In this paper, we propose a channel/slot scheduling based on 802.15.4e-TSCH mechanism for wirless sensor networks. In our mechanism, each node determines its requirements in terms of channel/slots by receiving scheduling matrices from its neighbors and according to the traffic volume passing through it. In this mechanism, we allocate dedicated cells for the nodes in the vicinity of the sink and also for the congested nodes. This mitigates the funneling effect. The simulation results over OpenWSN emulator confirm the efficiency of our mechanism.