Decentralized traffic aware scheduling for multi-hop low power lossy networks in the internet of things

The emerging IEEE802.15.4e standard and IETF RPL routing protocol are core to the organization of multi-hop Low-power and Lossy Networks. They provide key functionalities useful for a really viable Internet of Things. However, several open issues still remain and require research efforts to be solved. Among others, the design of effective scheduling schemes in such systems is one of the major problems; in fact, there are no specifications about how schedules should be realized. Trying to fill this gap, this paper presents a new Decentralized Traffic-Aware Scheduling algorithm, which is able to construct optimum multi-hop schedules in a distributed fashion. Its effectiveness has been proved by using simulation results and comparing it with a centralized scheme. The reported performance results encourage the use of the developed scheduling technique, since it allows a very efficient queue management, and thus it minimizes packet discards due to buffer overflows, while at the same time minimizing the network duty cycle.