6TiSCH: Industrial Performance for IPv6 Internet-of-Things Networks

The convergence of operational and information technologies in the industry requires a new generation of IP-compliant communication protocols that can meet the industrial performance requirements while facilitating the integration with novel web-based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. For more than a decade, the industry has relied on time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) communication technology to meet these performance requirements through standards such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a. TSCH-based networks have proven to yield over 99.999% end-to-end reliability, supporting flow isolation and QoS management while ensuring over a decade of battery lifetime. However, these technologies were designed to address the factory use cases of a decade ago, not considering IP compliance or standardized network management and resource orchestration as a must. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the 6TiSCH working group (WG) have been actively working on this challenge by designing protocols to bridge the performance of industrial solutions with IP-compliant networks. The effort has resulted in 6TiSCH, a set of specifications that define the IPv6 control plane to manage and orchestrate a TSCH network. 6TiSCH provides the missing elements for zero-configuration TSCH network bootstrap, efficient network access authentication, and distributed and modular scheduling mechanisms. As a cross-layer effort, 6TiSCH leverages and integrates other IETF specifications and the WG has also driven the definition of novel specifications in other IETF WGs. An ultimate goal of this effort is the definition of a fully functional architecture where a combination of IETF protocols enables the envisioned convergence on top of the IEEE industrial standard. This paper introduces the work done by the 6TiSCH WG at IETF, evaluates the performance of the reference implementation, and discusses the 6TiSCH software ecosystem.