As the widely adopted IEEE 802.15.4 standard exhibited severe drawbacks when used in multi-hop WSN environment, the IEEE Standards Association Board has released a revised version, IEEE 802.15.4e, which includes Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mechanism as the MAC amendment to IEEE 802.15.4. The key feature of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH mechanism is to allow the sensors to plan the time-slot schedule for efficient data transmission. However, the standard does not specify how to plan a time-slot schedule so that data collected by the sensors can be received by the base station as soon as possible without being delayed by transmission conflicts. In this paper, we propose a constant-time, distributed time-slot scheduling algorithm to address this problem. Existing works on IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH scheduling depend on one or a few nodes to collect traffic-flow information from their descendants and plan a centralized time-slot schedule for the whole network. In contrast, our algorithm allows every sensor node to compute its time-slot schedule in a simple, truly distributed manner. Simulation results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art protocol in terms of the packet transmission delay and yields a smaller duty cycle. HighlightsThe current state of the art of IEEE 802.15.4e standard is reviewed.The minimum TSCH schedule for conflict-free data gathering process in an IEEE 802.15.4e WSN is shown to be NP-hard.A constant-time, distributed scheduling algorithm to address the minimum IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH scheduling problem is proposed.