6TiSCH Architecture for the Industrial Internet of Things: Performance Analysis

The IETF is defining the 6TiSCH Architecture for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to provide low-latency, low jitter, and high-reliability communication. The 6TiSCH architecture identifies different ways to manage communication resources, namely static, centralized, autonomous, distributed, and hop-by-hop approaches. The distributed approach has gained more attention thanks to its capabilities of self-configuration and adaptation to different network conditions. In distributed scheduling, each node runs a Scheduling Function (SF) to dynamically compute the number of resources to allocate, and leverages the 6top protocol (6P) to negotiate them with its neighbors. In this paper, we focus on the distributed mode and provide an overview of our ongoing research activity on this topic.