On the suitability of 6TiSCH for industrial wireless communication

Abstract

The IETF, concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture , nowadays also looks into industrial automation processes. The contributions of a variety of IETF activities, initiated during the last ten years, enable now the replacement of proprietary standards by an open standardized protocol stack. This stack, denoted in the following as 6TiSCH-stack, is tailored for industrial internet of things (IIoTs). The suitability of 6TiSCH-stack for Industry 4.0 is yet to explore. In this paper, we identify four challenges that, in our opinion, may delay or hinder its adoption. As a prime example of that, we focus on the initial 6TiSCH-network formation, highlighting the shortcomings of the default procedure and introducing our current work for a fast and reliable formation of dense network.