6TiSCH X. Vilajosana, Ed.
Internet-Draft Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Intended status: Best Current Practice K. Pister
Expires: June 1, 2017 University of California Berkeley
November 28, 2016

Minimal 6TiSCH Configuration
draft-ietf-6tisch-minimal-17

Abstract

This document describes a minimal mode of operation for a 6TiSCH Network. It provides IPv6 connectivity over a Non-Broadcast Multi-Access (NBMA) mesh composed of IEEE802.15.4 Timeslotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) links. This minimal mode uses a collection of protocols including the 6LoWPAN framework to enable interoperable IPv6 connectivity over IEEE802.15.4 TSCH with minimal network configuration and infrastructure.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This Internet-Draft will expire on June 1, 2017.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.


Table of Contents

1. Introduction

A 6TiSCH Network provides IPv6 connectivity over a Non-Broadcast Multi-Access (NBMA) network that is composed of IEEE802.15.4 Timeslotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) links.

Nodes in an IEEE802.15.4 TSCH network follow a communication schedule. When following this specification, a node learns the schedule of the network when joining, the schedule is static and the same for all nodes.

This specification defines operational parameters and procedures for a minimal mode of operation to build a 6TiSCH Network. The 802.15.4 TSCH mode, the 6LoWPAN framework, RPL [RFC6550], and its Objective Function 0 (OF0) [RFC6552], are used unmodified. Parameters and particular operations of TSCH are specified to guarantee interoperability between nodes in a 6TiSCH Network. RPL is a natural choice for routing on top of IEEE802.15.4 TSCH, and the specifics for interoperable interaction between RPL and TSCH are described.

More advanced work is expected in the future to complement the Minimal Configuration with dynamic operations that can adapt the schedule to the needs of the traffic at run time.

2. Requirements Language

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

3. Terminology

This document uses terminology from [I-D.ietf-6tisch-terminology]. The following concepts are used in this document:

SFD:
Start of Frame Delimiter.
RX:
Reception.
TX:
Transmission.
Join Metric:
Field in the TSCH Synchronization IE. Number of hops separating the node sending the EB, and the PAN coordinator.

4. IEEE802.15.4 Settings

An implementation compliant to this specification MUST implement the IEEE802.15.4 [IEEE802154-2015] in "timeslotted channel hopping" (TSCH) mode.

The remainder of this section details the RECOMMENDED TSCH settings, which are summarized in Figure 1. A node MAY use different values. Any of the properties marked in the EB column are announced in the Enhanced Beacons (EB) the nodes send [IEEE802154-2015]. Changing their value hence means changing the contents of the EB.

In case of discrepancy between the values in this specification and the IEEE802.15.4 specification [IEEE802154-2015], the IEEE standard has precedence.