A comprehensive performance comparison of IEEE 802.15.4 DSME and TSCH in a realistic IoT scenario for industrial applications

In the Industrial Internet of Things (i.e., IIoT), the standardization of open technologies and protocols has achieved seamless data exchange between machines and other physical systems from different manufacturers. At the MAC sublayer, the industry-standard protocols IEEE 802.15.4 Time Slot Channel Hopping (TSCH) and Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME) show promising properties for high adaptability and dynamically changing traffic. However, performance comparison between these MAC protocols rarely has gone beyond a simulation phase. This work presents the results of such a comparison on physically deployed networks using the facilities of the FIT-IoTLab. The evaluation includes fully implementing an IIoT protocol stack based on MQTT in Contiki-NG. It comprises the integration of DSME as part of Contiki-NG's software stack through OpenDSME, the only publicly available implementation of DSME. Results show that both protocols suit IIoT applications, particularly for data collection. The comparison between TSCH and DSME also includes an evaluation of distributed schedulers for both MAC modes and one autonomous scheduler for TSCH within a UDP protocol stack.

Subjects

6LoWPAN

6TiSCH

ALICE

alternating CAP-reduction

CAP-reduction

Contiki-ng

DSME

FIT-IoTLab

IEEE 802.15.4

IIoT

interoperability

minimal scheduling function

MQTT

RPL

TCP

TSCH

UDP

DDC Class

620: Engineering

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A comprehensive performance comparison of IEEE 802.15.4 DSME and TSCH in a realistic IoT scenario for industrial applications