Enhancing End-to-End Determinism and Reliability in 6TiSCH networks with disjoint leaf-based MPLS-like tunnels

TL;DR

This paper presents a cross-layer approach combining routing, MPLS-like tunnels, and delay control to enhance reliability and determinism in 6TiSCH networks, significantly improving packet delivery and network lifetime.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of strategies for 6TiSCH networks to achieve both high reliability and deterministic behavior simultaneously.

Findings

Packet delivery rate before deadline increased by 2.04 times.

Network lifetime increased by 1.5 times.

Improved end-to-end reliability and energy efficiency.

Abstract

Industrial multi-hop Internet of Things (IIoT) have strict reliability requirements and they are expected to have deterministic behavior. Reliability is associated with the network's ability to provide the best goodput possible to the destination from the source application, while deterministic behavior implies that the packets must also arrive at the destination before the maximum allowable deadline defined by the application expires. Although a relevant number of proposals have arisen in recent years, none of them achieve both restrictions simultaneously. In this work, we propose a cross-layer approach to solve this problem, by combining three strategies: (i) the use of the preferred parents (PP) and alternative parents (AP) together with the PRE (Packet Replication and Elimination) technique at the routing level; (ii) the use of MPLS tunnels from the leafNode, improving the Data Plane, to control the energy consumption and (iii) the use of the BDPC (Bounded Delay Packet Control) algorithm. The combination of the former strategies show that the behavior of the packet flows improves the end-to-end Packet Delivery Rate of the packets arriving before the deadline by 2.04 times with respect to standard Minimum Scheduling Function reference network while simultaneously increasing the minimum average network lifetime by 1.5 times, with respect to the hop by hop uncontrolled usage of PRE.