Network Formation in 6TiSCH Industrial Internet of Things under Misbehaved Nodes

Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol proposed by the IEEE 802.15.4e standard. It is designed to meet the requirements of industrial networks, such as high Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and bounded delays, along with low energy consumption. TSCH is now the basis of a full stack for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) proposed by the International Engineering Task Force (IETF), known as 6TiSCH (IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e). Since 6TiSCH networks are expected to offer high performance and fast bootstrapping, the network formation time could be impacted by the network size and the rate of control packets. In this paper, we demonstrate that non cooperative nodes, which can be malicious, could also drastically increase the network joining time. First, we propose the attack model and its implementation on the 6TiSCH simulator. Then, we carry out a set of experiments for different network sizes. Finally, we show through simulation results the impact of the proposed attack on the joining time.