Broadcasting Strategies in 6TiSCH Networks

International audienceWe consider IPv6-enabled networks that run on top of the time-slotted channel hopping mode of IEEE802.15.4 (6TiSCH). The ongoing discussions in the standardization community concern the network formation process and the definition of a bootstrapping protocol by which a new mote is admitted into the network. Because the bootstrapping trac uses the same shared slots as the network broadcasts, the key to the optimal performance of the network formation process lays in the optimization of the network broadcasting strategy. The problem boils down to the issue of stabilizing slotted Aloha. To do so, we adapt a broadcast algorithm to the specifics of 6TiSCH networks. By simulation, we evaluate the optimal broadcast transmission probability in the network. We answer the open questions in the IETF 6TiSCH standardization community that concern the performance of the network formation process for the optimal values of transmission probability. As the main contribution of the letter, we provide network administrators with a set of values that allow the formation of dense networks

SODA: 6TiSCH Open Data Action

International audienceIndustrial-grade performance of wireless networks has become a reality of the open Internet of Things through a low-power wireless technology called 6TiSCH. A standardization group of the same name within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working on a zero-configuration, IPv6-enabled solution applicable to industrial monitoring and control, smart building, home, city and agriculture. The base standardization work is virtually done. Before different stakeholders invest significant resources in developing and deploying 6TiSCH-based solutions, they need to have a certain level of assurance about whether the technology indeed meets their requirements. An unbiased performance benchmark of a standards-compliant 6TiSCH solution is therefore required by the industry, the research community and the standardization group. 6TiSCH Open Data Action (SODA) is a research project that will provide a 6TiSCH benchmark and open datasets in different industry-relevant scenarios. SODA will automate the experimentation on these scenarios so benchmarking can remain up-to-date with changes to the standards, and facilitate comparison with future technological developments, resulting in continuous delivery benchmarking. This paper introduces the SODA project and seeks community involvement on the definition of scenarios and Key Performance Indicators, and on the usage of the tools that will be provided

Key Performance Indicators of the Reference 6TiSCH Implementation in Internet-of-Things Scenarios

International audienceTens of thousands of wireless industrial monitoring deployments exist today, logging more than 18 billion operating hours. These solutions have been around for over a decade and are based on standards such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a to provide performance guarantees to the applications. The new trend in industry deployments is the convergence of operational and information technologies happening through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm. The challenge is to bridge the performance of these well-proven industrial standards with the interoperability of IP-based systems. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization behind most of the technical solutions of the Internet, has produced a set of specifications with this requirement in mind. The output of this effort is the 6TiSCH protocol stack based on open standards, such as those that have played a key role in the Internet's ubiquitous adoption. The standardization of 6TiSCH is done. The state-of-the-art research work focus is on important, but niche, optimizations and performance evaluations of the 6TiSCH stack. This paper takes a different approach-it evaluates the performance of the standards-compliant 6TiSCH solution from the end user point of view. It does so on two experimental testbeds, in typical IoT test scenarios based on a well-defined experimentation methodology. We provide a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) useful for the end user to decide whether the 6TiSCH technology is a good fit performance-wise for a particular use case. We demonstrate reliability of a vanilla open-source implementation of 6TiSCH above 99.99%, upstream latency on the order of a second and radio duty cycle well below 1%

DeSSR: a Decentralized, Broadcast-Based Scalable Scheduling Reservation Protocol for 6TiSCH Networks

The emergence of IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) for low-power wireless communication is considered a breakthrough allowing a densely populated multi-hop network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be used for data gathering over a range of 1-2 kilometer (km). However, the communication between the devices has suffered from external interferences and multi-path fading challenge. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) jointly proposed The IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH mode (6TiSCH) to deal with existing challenges and improve network performance to meet key requirements of industrial applications. The 6Top layer integrates TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping)-MAC over IEEE 802.15.4 with the rest of the IPv6 stack where the schedule allocation is performed by scheduling function (SF). However, network scalability remains an open challenge. Specifically, the 6TiSCH Working Group (WG) do not define rules towards optimal schedule allocation over Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4. In this paper, we propose Decentralized, and Broadcast-based Scalable Scheduling Reservation Protocol for 6TiSCH Networks (DeSSR). The experimental performance analysis demonstrates strong performance under steady and bursty traffic when compared with current SFs. This makes DeSSR a strong proposal contributing towards improving scalability in large-scale 6TiSCH networks.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin