6TiSCH – IPv6 Enabled Open Stack IoT Network Formation: A Review

The IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH mode (6TiSCH) network is intended to provide reliable and delay bounded communication in multi-hop and scalable Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IEEE 802.15.4e Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) link layer protocol allows the nodes to change their physical channel after each transmission to eliminate interference and multi-path fading on the channels. However, due to this feature, new nodes (aka pledges) take more time to join the 6TiSCH network, resulting in significant energy consumption and inefficient data transmission, which makes the communication unreliable. Therefore, the formation of 6TiSCH network has gained immense interest among the researchers. To date, numerous solutions have been offered by various researchers in order to speed up the formation of 6TiSCH networks. This article briefly discusses about the 6TiSCH network and its formation process, followed by a detailed survey on the works that considered 6TiSCH network formation. We also perform theoretical analysis and real testbed experiments for a better understanding of the existing works related to 6TiSCH network formation. This article is concluded after summarizing the research challenges in 6TiSCH network formation and providing a few open issues in this domain of work.