CoAP over BP for a Delay-Tolerant Internet of Things

Abstract

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) a myriad of new devices will become part of our everyday life. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), and its extensions, are specifically designed to address the integration of these constrained devices. However, due to their limited resources, they are often unable to be fully connected and instead form intermittently connected and sparse networks in which Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is more appropriate, in particular through the Bundle Protocol (BP). This paper addresses the implementation of a BP binding for CoAP as a means to enable Delay Tolerant IoT. After an overview of CoAP and BP, we present a basic implementation of CoAP/BP that we developed and some first experimentation results that validate the feasibility of the approach. Several leads are then explored regarding ways to take advantage of the BP features in order to achieve an optimized CoAP/BP implementation.