A Noncooperative Gaming Approach for Control Packet Transmission in 6TiSCH Network

The 6TiSCH communication architecture is widely used in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to provide reliable, delay-bounded, and energy-efficient communication in multihop scenarios. However, the channel hopping feature and the resource allocation strategy of 6TiSCH minimal configuration (6TiSCH-MC) standard negatively impact the 6TiSCH network by increasing network formation time. 6TiSCH-MC allows only one cell (known as minimal cell) per slotframe to transmit control packets. When the number of joined nodes increases in the network, the formation time also increases because of the increasing congestion in the minimal cell. Furthermore, the existing works did not study the effect of transmission rates of all control packets together during 6TiSCH network formation. Therefore, in this work, a noncooperative game is formulated, for optimal transmission of control packets by the joined nodes. The obtained solution of the proposed game, using the Lagrange multiplier and Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions, is used in the proposed congestion control scheme—game theory-based congestion control (GTCC). GTCC calculates the slotframe window (SW) size for every node to control the congestion in minimal cell without any signaling overhead. GTCC is validated using the analytical model as well as the FIT IoT-LAB testbed. The findings of both the analytical and testbed experiments show that GTCC significantly reduces the joining time and energy consumption of new nodes (i.e., pledges) as compared to previous benchmark schemes.