Towards the support of Industrial IoT applications with TSCH

Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLN) are utilised for numerous Internet of Things (IoT) applications. IEEE has specified the Time-slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) Media Access Control (MAC) to target the needs of Industrial IoT. TSCH supports deterministic communications over unreliable wireless environments and balances energy, bandwidth and latency. Furthermore, the Minimal 6TiSCH configuration defined Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL) with the Objective Function 0 (OF0). Inherent factors from RPL operation, such as joining procedure, parent switching, and trickle timer fluctuations, may introduce overhead and overload the network with control messages. The application and RPL control data may lead to an unpredicted networking bottleneck, potentially causing network instability. Hence, a stable RPL operation contributes to a healthy TSCH operation. In this paper, we explore TSCH MAC and RPL metrics to identify factors that lead to performance degradation and specify indicators to anticipate network disorders towards increasing Industrial IoT reliability. A TSCH Schedule Function might employ the identified aspects to foresee disturbances, proactively allocate the proper amount of cells, and avoid networking congestion.