Date of Award

6-2-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2026

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

First Advisor

Yidi Wang

Abstract

This project investigates 6TiSCH (IPv6 over Time-Slotted Channel Hopping), a relatively recent IETF networking standard introduced in 2013 that combines deterministic TSCH scheduling, 6LoWPAN header compression, and RPL mesh routing to enable low-power, reliable, multi-hop wireless communication for IoT deployments. Despite its strong theoretical properties, 6TiSCH remains underexplored in practice, and real-world questions around configuration, scalability, power behavior, and end-to-end integration are not well documented. Our primary goal was to build and operate a working 6TiSCH network, characterize its performance through iterative testing, and understand what it takes to go from raw packet delivery to a complete data pipeline.

To ground this exploration in a concrete use case, we applied the network to smart agricultural monitoring. TI CC26X2R1 LaunchPad nodes running Contiki-NG firmware collect temperature, humidity, and soil moisture readings every five minutes and transmit compact 12-byte UDP payloads across the 6TiSCH mesh to a Raspberry Pi 5 gateway. The gateway parses and validates packets and forwards structured records to a Railway-hosted PostgreSQL database, which feeds a Next.js dashboard providing real-time readings, field topology mapping, and historical analytics. Iterative configuration tuning brought packet loss from significant early levels down to 0% in final multi-node trials. Chip-level power analysis confirmed a steady-state radio duty cycle of approximately 3.5% and a total current draw of 0.29 mA, translating to a realistic battery life of 5–6 months on a 3→AA NiMH pack. These results validate 6TiSCH as a reliable, low-power networking foundation and demonstrate that a full end-to-end pipeline from embedded sensing to cloud-backed visualization can be built on it using open standards and modular hardware.

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