Wireless mesh networks are a promising technology for connecting sensors and
actuators with high flexibility and low investment costs. In industrial
applications, however, reliability is essential. Therefore, two time-slotted
medium access methods, DSME and TSCH, were added to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
They allow collision-free communication in multi-hop networks and provide
channel hopping for mitigating external interferences. The slot schedule used
in these networks is of high importance for the network performance. This paper
supports the development of efficient schedules by providing an analytical
model for the assessment of such schedules, focused on TSCH. A Markov chain
model for the finite queue on every node is introduced that takes the slot
distribution into account. The models of all nodes are interconnected to
calculate network metrics such as packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and
throughput. An evaluation compares the model with a simulation of the Orchestra
schedule. The model is applied to Orchestra as well as to two simple
distributed scheduling algorithms to demonstrate the importance of
traffic-awareness for achieving high throughput.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure