Tomorrow's smart factory will rely heavily on low-power wireless mesh technology to monitor and automate the manufacturing process. A combination of centralized control and distributed intelligence will ensure different data flows coexist in the wireless "umbrella" network spanning the smart factory.

For low-power wireless to be usable in tomorrow's smart factory, it must offer Determinism, Manageability and Service level agreements. One major challenge is that wireless is unreliable in nature: in a typical smart factory environment, multi-path fading and external interference affect the reliability of the wireless links.

We propose a ground-up redesign of low-power wireless technology, with an architecture rooted in the "Time Synchronized Channel Hopping" (TSCH) link-layer technology focused on determinism and manageability.

A TSCH network combines time synchronization to achieve ultra low-power resource reservation, and channel hopping to increase reliability of the wireless link by combating external interference and multi-path fading. Communication in a TSCH network is orchestrated by a schedule which indicates to each node what to do in each timeslot (transmit, receive or sleep), and on which channel (frequency).

Description
The goal of your research is to conduct a rigorous study on the capabilities of TSCH technology and identify its performance bounds (latency, throughput, reliability, power consumption). The idea is two-fold: (1) define the "box" of constraints TSCH technology can be used in, and quickly identify unrealistic assumptions, and (2) determine the theoretical performance bounds of TSCH networks. You will then compare these results against solutions developed in the IETF 6TiSCH working group, and by other members of the HiPERCOM2 research team.