Abstract
The Industrial Internet of Things tends now to emerge as a key paradigm to interconnect a collection of wireless devices. However, most industrial applications have strict requirements, especially concerning the reliability and the latency. IEEE802.15.4-TSCH represents currently a promising standard relying on a strict schedule of the transmissions to provide such guarantees. The standard ISA-100.11a-2011 has proposed the concept of duocast, where a pair of receivers are allocated to the same transmission opportunity to increase the reliability. In this paper, we generalize this approach to involve k different receivers, and we explore the impact of this technique on the performance of the network. We propose an algorithm assigning several receivers for each transmission to increase the probability that at least one device receives correctly the packet. By exploiting a multipath topology created by the routing layer, we are able to reduce the number of transmissions while still achieving the same reliability. We consequently increase the network capacity, and reduce significantly the jitter. Our simulation results highlight the relevance of this k-cast technique in TSCH for the Industrial Internet of Things.