BOOST: Bringing Opportunistic ROuting and Effortless-Scheduling to TSCH MAC

The Time Synchronised Channel Hopping (TSCH) MAC, adopted in popular WirelessHART, ISA100.11a and IEEE802.15.4e, is emerging as the de-facto technique for critical wireless industrial monitoring and control applications. However, much of its benefits are tied to the ability of the protocols and the scheduling techniques to optimally route traffic and orchestrate communication over individual links in a non- conflicting manner. Existing routing and scheduling approaches employ complex algorithms requiring excessive signalling overhead. While some of them can build optimal solutions under static conditions, they lack the agility to adapt to changes in network topology, traffic, and link qualities. To overcome these limitations, we propose BOOST, a protocol that blends TSCH with opportunistic routing and an effortless scheduling technique. BOOST complements the native support of spatial and channel diversity of the former with receiver diversity of the latter, pushing the envelope of network reliability to over 99.99\%. Its ultra-lightweight autonomous scheduling mechanism adapts the communication schedule to network changes instantly with almost zero signalling overhead when other solutions struggle with tens of seconds or even minutes of delay with low reliability during this period.