CoAP-Based Remote Network Management Model for Deterministic 6TiSCH Networks

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), integral to Industry 4.0, leverages wireless low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) for critical applications. These networks fulfill demanding industrial requirements, ensuring limited end-to-end latency and high reliability. The Internet engineering task force (IETF) has developed the 6TiSCH protocol stack, a network architecture comprising cutting-edge standards to support this IIoT paradigm. Particularly, the 6TiSCH architecture introduces "tracks" to deliver deterministic Quality of Service (QoS) across diverse networks, aligning with stringent service level agreements (SLAs). Furthermore, the reliable and available wireless (RAW) work group, now part of the deterministic networking (DetNet) group, enhances this concept for wireless-specific challenges. The RAW framework effectively balances redundancy against the constraints like spectrum and battery usage. It incorporates reliability mechanisms, including tracks and specialized control routines. This article focuses on applying tracks within deterministic 6TiSCH networks, in line with IETF standard, to demonstrate the ability of tracks to tend toward deterministic performance in wireless mesh networks. We provide a new remote network management interface, evolved from current 6TiSCH protocols, particularly 6top and constrained application protocol, designed to install and maintain tracks in 6TiSCH networks. Our approach, implemented in the OpenWSN open-source protocol stack, is evaluated on the real OpenMote-B hardware for two real-life use cases. The performance evaluation shows drastic improvement in latency (up to 4.5 times).