The IEEE 802.15.4e standard is an amendment of the IEEE 802.15.4-2011 protocol by introducing time-slotted channel hopping access behavior mode. However, the IEEE 802.15.4e only defines time-slotted channel hopping link-layer mechanisms without an investigation of network formation and communication scheduling which are still open issues to the research community. This article investigates the network formation issue of the IEEE 802.15.4e time-slotted channel hopping networks. In time-slotted channel hopping networks, a joining node normally takes a long time period to join the network because the node has to wait until there is at least one enhanced beacon message advertised by synchronized nodes (synchronizers) in the network on its own synchronization channel. This leads to a long joining delay and high energy consumption during the network formation phase, especially so in highly dynamic networks in which nodes join or rejoin frequently. To enable a rapid time-slotted channel hopping network formation, this article proposes a new design for slotframe structure and a novel adaptive joining scheme based on fuzzy logic. Our proposed scheme enables a synchronizer to be able to adaptively determine an appropriate number of enhanced beacons it should advertise, based on the number of available synchronizers in the network, so that joining nodes can achieve a short joining time while energy consumption of enhanced beacon advertisement at the synchronizers is optimized. Through extensive mathematical analysis and experimental results, we show that the proposed scheme achieves a significant improvement in terms of joining delay compared to state-of-the-art studies.

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