Update from Wireless Standards

Technical Abstract

The next percentile point of process optimization yields hundreds of billions of savings, and will be gained by leveraging the collection of currently unused measurements by widely distributed sensing devices and analytic capabilities. Gathering and processing this unused data will require the combination of the best of IT and OT technologies together, forming the IT/OT convergence, aka the Industrial Internet.

Factory networks primarily rely on wired communication networks to support Industrial Automation and Control applications. On the other hand, Wireless Sensor Networks have the power to extend the reach of Monitoring and Control to gather unused measurements beyond what is physically and economically possible with wires; to this day, the deployment of wireless communications in industrial environments has been hampered by a perceived lack of determinism.

The IEEE and the IETF are creating a new generation of Low Power wireless protocols suitable for Time Sensitive Industrial applications. The Deterministic IPv6 over IEEE802.15.4e Time slotted Channel Hopping (6TiSCH) is a new IETF Work Group that formed to enable IPv6 over the TSCH mode of the IEEE802.15.4e standard. The scope of the WG includes one or more Low-power Lossy Networks (LLNs), federated by a backbone through one or more BackBone Routers (BBRs). The Work Group will deliver a networking architecture and put together a collection of standards for centralized and distributed routing and scheduling over a TSCH MAC.

This paper will introduces the work being conducted by this new working group to the ODVA constituency.

Paper and presentation from the 2014 ODVA Industry Conference & 16th Annual Meeting

Pascal Thubert,  Cisco Systems, Inc.