Distributed Scheduling of Enhanced Beacons for IEEE802.15.4-TSCH Body Area Networks

Body Area Networks (BANs) expect to exploit IEEE802. 15.4-2015-TSCH, proposing an efficient MAC layer for wireless industrial sensor networks. The standard relies on techniques such as channel hopping and bandwidth reservation to ensure both energy savings and reliable transmissions. With the expected growth of the BAN usage, we must now consider dense topologies, and interference. In this paper, we propose a rescheduling algorithm to avoid the collisions among the Enhanced Beacons (EB): each coordinator is able to adapt distributively its transmission to avoid interference. Indeed, EB losses impact negatively the performance of a BAN. We also optimized conjointly the neighbor discovery mechanism since a multichannel MAC would else increase too much the discovery delay. Our simulations validate the relevance of our discovery and scheduling mechanisms to cope with a very dense deployment of interfering BANs.