Mobility Management in Industrial IoT Environments

Abstract

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined the 6TiSCH architecture to enable the Industrial Inter-net of Things (IIoT). Unfortunately, 6TiSCH does not provide mechanisms to manage node mobility, while many industrial applications involve mobile devices (e.g., mobile robots or wearable devices carried by workers). In this paper, we consider the Synchronized Single-hop Multiple Gateway framework to manage mobility in 6TiSCH networks. For this framework, we address the problem of positioning Border Routers in a deployment area, which is similar to the "Art Gallery" problem, proposing an efficient deployment policy for Border Routers based on geometrical rules. Moreover, we define a flexible Scheduling Function that can be easily adapted to meet the requirements of various IIoT applications. We analyze the considered Scheduling Function in different scenarios with varying traffic patterns, and define an algorithm for sizing the system in such a way to guarantee the application requirements. Finally, we investigate the impact of mobility on the performance of the system. Our results show that the proposed solutions allow to manage node mobility very effectively, and without significant impact on the performance.