Group Communication in Constrained Environments using CoAP-based Entities
Abstract
The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a
new Internet protocol that is currently being standardized. CoAP
allows access to the drastically increasing number of smart
objects and their sensing resources from virtually anywhere. It is
a light-weight protocol designed to cope with the restrictions
imposed by the limited resources (CPU, memory, power,…) of
many smart objects. Depending on the application, information
from individual objects might not be sufficient, reliable, or
useful. An application may need to aggregate and/or compare
data from a group of objects in order to obtain accurate results.
Although multicast may be used to transmit the same request to
several objects, multicast communication with smart objects has
some disadvantages. Programming individual requests is another
solution but lacks flexibility and opportunities for reusability. In
this paper we propose a novel CoAP-based approach for
communication with a group of resources across multiple smart
objects. This approach organizes the group of resources that
should be accessed into a new CoAP resource, called an entity,
and nicely integrates several important aspects of entity
management: creation, validation, usage and manipulation. In
order to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach we present
an implementation and experimental validation.