Lessons Learned from the 6TiSCH Plugtests

The principal barrier to massive IoT technology adoption is the lack of interoperability and the resulting segmented nature of the IoT market. To cope with that the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things (IERC), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) promote the development of interoperability events to enforce real standard compliance and interoperability between vendors. In this paper, we summarize the lessons learned during the first ETSI Plugtests event on the technology developed by the IETF 6TiSCH working group. 6TiSCH technology is cornerstone to the Industrial Internet of Things, enabling operational technologies to converge to the Internet by providing seamless IP connectivity and standardized management. The event clearly demonstrated the importance of such interoperability testing early on in the standards development. Interoperability was tested between implementations of 6TiSCH technology from multiple vendors. A total of 221 tests were performed, with a 93.7% success rate.