Network Formation for Industrial IoT: Evaluation, Limits and Recommendations

An open standardized protocol stack proposed by IETF is nowadays emerging in industrial wireless communication. Main building blocks are TSCH at MAC layer and RPL as routing protocol. This standard architecture is able to replace proprietary technology and to guarantee a timely, reliable and energy efficient communication. However, IETF can not offer a one-size-fits-all solution. Therefore, implementers of industrial IoT have to correctly set the parameters of the protocols in this stack, adapting it to the application requirements and on the physical topology. This paper focuses on the network formation procedure proposed by IETF 6TiSCH working group, a mandatory phase before nodes may transmit any sensed data. We evaluate through simulations the impact of TSCH- and RPL-parameters on the duration of and the energy consumed for the network formation process. We describe how to avoid an unsuccessful network formation and we give guidelines for an appropriate parameter setting, depending on typical network topologies.