Quick6TiSCH: Accelerating Formation of 6TiSCH Networks with TSCH and RPL

6TiSCH is an IPv6 protocol stack over time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4e and routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL), enabling lowpower wireless multi-hop networking for Internet of Things (IoT). However, its network formation process involving TSCH bootstrapping, RPL topology formation, and TSCH resource scheduling, is often extremely slow due to its inherent rendezvous mechanism; the use of TSCH common shared cells. Common shared cell is the sole transmission path during network formation, and thus collisions are frequent in these scarce resources while clear channel assessment fails to resolve the issue. To address this problem, we propose Quick6TiSCH, a method for accelerating 6TiSCH network formation by prioritizing critical control messages and diversifying their transmission times within common shared cells to facilitate collision avoidance among nodes. Since negotiation is infeasible prior to network formation, Quick6TiSCH adopts an autonomous approach allowing each node to adaptively mitigate collisions based on its network join progress. Evaluation on real-world testbeds demonstrate a significant reduction in network formation time by 62.6% with transmission overhead similar to the baseline.