A protocol for Internet of Things : IETF 6TİSCH

Abstract

In recent years, there is an increased interest toward Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with the introduction of application areas such as industrial internet, m-Health and Smart Grid. WSNs consist of sensors with wireless capability operating autonomously and reporting application specific parameters to a central entity. Many applications including industrial applications require the WSN to have a low and deterministic delay. Having a deterministic network delay in a WSN is challenging in the best case when traditional Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are employed. To enable low power, high reliability and deterministic WSNs, IETF recently proposed 6TiSCH protocol which uses time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) MAC with IPv6 addressing. This protocol dynamically assigns bandwidth resources to the nodes in the network according to the application requirements. This paper describes an implementation of 6TiSCH protocol in Contiki OS and a distributed scheduling mechanism for this protocol. We evaluate the protocol performance using Cooja simulator for different networking scenarios and compare it to that of a slotted Aloha type access mechanism.