Abstract The Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is expected to revolutionize the Industrial Internet of Things. Indeed, it can achieve high reliability and deterministic latency with a very low duty cycle. Nevertheless, forming a TSCH network with the standard approach might not be as efficient, constituting, thus, one of the TSCH’s major issues. Such a network formation process relies on nodes passively scanning for advertised Enhanced Beacon (EB) frames to join the network. Doing so, a node wishing to join a TSCH network may stay awake randomly scanning for EBs for a considerable period of time, leading to a lengthy formation process with excessive energy consumption. To deal with these issues, this paper presents a practical and effective Radio duty-cycled, Active-Scan based network formation process for TSCH networks (RAST). Our proposal leans on active-scan procedures combined with radio duty cycling mechanisms to shorten joining delays and reduce energy consumption. Obtained results from extensive and realistic simulations show that our solution is efficient and outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, regarding the association time and energy consumption by up to two orders of magnitude.