• 6tisch
• 6top
• contiki
• internet of things
• performance evaluation

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) will represent a crucial enabling technology to interconnect sensors and actuators in the future industrial Internet of Things. Since many applications will demand for reliable and low-latency communication, current standardization efforts are focusing on the definition of novel wireless standard architectures e.g., the 6TiSCH architecture, to improve reliability and introduce support for quality of service. In this thesis we carried out a performance evaluation of the 6TiSCH architecture. Specifically, two aspects of the distributed mode of 6TiSCH are analyzed: the 6top protocol and the algorithm currently under standardization for resource management. In the first part, the 6top Protocol, the protocol defined in 6TiSCH for the distributed negotiation of resources, is evaluated. Experiments highlighted how the negotiation of resources is influenced by the routing protocol and the link quality estimation mechanism adopted. The performance evaluation allowed to draw a set of guidelines to guarantee the reliability of the initial allocation of resources. In the second part, the On-The-Fly Bandwidth Reservation (OTF) Scheduling Function (SF), the algorithm that determines the amount of communication resources allocated to each node, is analyzed. Simulation results highlighted a poor adaption of the Scheduling Function to the dynamism of the routing protocol and an inaccurate calculation of the bandwidth by the Bandwidth Estimation Algorithm, that cause a high End-to-End latency and a low End-to-End reliability. In order to overcome OTF limitations, a modified version has been proposed to reduce the End-to-End Latency and to improve the End-to-End Reliability.