Traffic Prioritization Mechanisms for Mission and Time Critical Applications in Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promises to revolutionize industrial operations and productions through utilizing Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. Since each node in such environments generates various types of data with diverse service requirements, MAC protocol holds crucial importance to ensure efficient delivery. In this context, simple to complex MAC schemes are found in literature. This paper focuses on evaluating the performance of two major techniques "slot stealing" and "packet fragmentation" for the IIoT; representative protocols SS-MAC and FROG-MAC have been chosen from each category respectively. We conducted realistic simulations for the two protocols using Contiki. Delay and packet loss comparison for SS-MAC and FROG-MAC indicates the superiority of FROG-MAC due to reduction in the waiting time for urgent traffic. Thus, a simple fragmentation scheme could be deployed for efficient scheduling of heterogenous traffic in the industrial environments.