Abstract:

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined the 6TiSCH architecture to enable the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While many industrial applications involve mobile devices (e.g., mobile robots or wearable devices carried by workers), 6TiSCH does not provide any mechanism to manage node mobility. However, recently, a Synchronized Single-hop Multiple Gateway (SHMG) architecture has been proposed to allow an efficient management of mobile nodes in 6TiSCH networks. The SHMG architecture is quite flexible and can be customized with appropriate resource allocation policies to meet the requirements of different IIoT applications. However, finding the most appropriate solution, depending on the application requirements, may not be trivial. In this paper, we present Mobile6TiSCH, a simulation tool based on OMNeT++, that implements the SHMG architecture. The proposed tool is very general and allows to evaluate the Quality of Service (QoS) achieved by a mobile node, in different scenarios characterized by different mobility patterns, scheduling algorithms, network configuration parameters and Border Router deployment strategies. As such, it can be used to evaluate different solutions in a simulated environment before implementing them in practice. We describe the general organization and implementation of the proposed simulation tool and show the simulation results to display its effectiveness.