Abstract
6TiSCH is an emerging networking technology proposed by IETF for the Industrial Internet of Things. As a result of its standardization effort, IETF has proposed the so-called minimal 6TiSCH configuration , which sets the minimal requirements for building functional 6TiSCH networks. However, this minimal configuration provably leads to large synchronization times and, consequently, to a waste of energy every time a node desires to join the network. In this paper, in order to optimize this initial synchronization process, we study the effect of the channel scan period on the initial synchronization time and on the energy consumption. The scan period is the time a node spends on listening for network advertisements on a specific channel as it scans the available channels in the network. Our study includes the mathematical modeling and analysis of the initial synchronization process, its algorithmic representation as well as experiments in a 12-node testbed. The theoretical results demonstrate that by optimally setting the scan period, we can achieve an up to 48.37% and 47.10% reduction in the average initial synchronization time compared to the default scan periods of Contiki-NG and OpenWSN respectively. Both the algorithmic approach and the experiments exhibit almost identical results, thus, confirming the performance improvement. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate an almost linear relation between the average initial synchronization time and the average energy consumption.
Highlights
At first, the need of high reliability and low-power consumption in industrial applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) led to the design of mechanisms such as the ‘‘Time Slotted Channel Hopping’’ (TSCH) for the IEEE802.15.4 physical layer [1]
We note that the analysis provided in the current paper is limited to the minimal 6TiSCH configuration which uses a single slot for advertisements, it can be used as a theoretical basis for the analysis of more complex multi-slot approaches that have been proposed in the literature, such as in [11], [12]
As far as we know, this study is the first that examines the impact of the scan period on the initial synchronization procedure of IEEE802.15.4-TSCH networks
Summary
The need of high reliability and low-power consumption in industrial applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) led to the design of mechanisms such as the ‘‘Time Slotted Channel Hopping’’ (TSCH) for the IEEE802.15.4 physical layer [1]. The use of the minimal 6TiSCH configuration worsens the problem of large synchronization times, since it provides limited resources for network advertising. 4) In the context of 6TiSCH applications with a predefined number of channels and slotframe duration, we enable the manufacturers or the administrators to optimize the initial synchronization process using the provided optimal scan period. 5) In 6TiSCH applications where the nodes do not know the number of channels and the slotframe duration apriori, they can calculate the optimal scan period after the initial synchronization. MINIMAL SCHEDULE Since 6TiSCH is based on the IEEE802.15.4-TSCH link layer protocol, the communication between the nodes takes place according to a schedule built on a slotframe; that is, a group of slots repeating over time.
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