Opportunistic Routing and Synchronous Transmissions Meet TSCH

Low-power wireless networking commonly uses either Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH), synchronous transmissions, or opportunistic routing. All three of these different, orthogonal approaches strive for efficient and reliable communication but follow different trajectories. With this paper, we combine these concepts into one protocol: Autobahn.Autobahn merges TSCH scheduling with opportunistically routed, synchronous transmissions. This opens the possibility to create long-term stable schedules overcoming local interference. We prove the stability of schedules over several days in our experimental evaluation. Moreover, Autobahn outperforms the autonomous scheduler Orchestra under interference in terms of reliability by 13.9 percentage points and in terms of latency by a factor of 9 under a minor duty cycle increase of 2.1 percentage points.