A Realistic Energy Consumption Model for TSCH Networks

Time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) is the highly reliable and ultra-low power medium access control technology at the heart of the IEEE802.15.4e-2012 amendment to the IEEE802.15.4-2011 standard. TSCH networks are deterministic in nature; the actions that occur at each time slot are well known. This paper presents an energy consumption model of these networks, obtained by slot-based “step-by-step” modeling and experimental validation on real devices running the OpenWSN protocol stack. This model is applied to different network scenarios to understand the potential effects of several network optimization. The model shows the impact of keep-alive and advertisement loads and discusses network configuration choices. Presented results show average current in the order of 570 μA on OpenWSN hardware and duty cycles 1% in network relays in both real and simulated networks. Leaf nodes show 0.46% duty cycle with data rates close to 10 packets per minute. In addition, the model is used to analyze the impact on energy consumption and data rate by overprovisioning slots to compensate for the lossy nature of these networks.