On the Optimization of Control Packet Management in Mesh 6TiSCH Networks

Control packet management in 6TiSCH mesh networks is a challenging task since it directly impacts the network’s performance, reliability, and longevity. This paper identifies the excessive overhead of control packets and the node concurrency as significant issues impacting mesh 6TiSCH networks. To enhance the network’s performance, we propose a set of improvements such as adaptive cell reservation and overhead reduction in 6TiSCH systems. Through extensive simulations on the 6TiSCH simulator, we demonstrate the improvements offered by our approach in terms of number of exchanged control/data packets, data packet delivery ratio, packet delivery ratio, network joining time, power consumption, and nodes’ lifetime, compared to the conventional 6TiSCH system. Our approach achieves a near 100% packet delivery ratio, faster node joining, approximately 10% lower latency, and a slightly higher longevity than the baseline.