Analytical model of IoT CoAP traffic

Abstract

Abstract The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a mechanism that enables the efficient transmission of information in the context of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) characteristic of the Internet of Things (IoT). CoAP is specifically intended to work well with low complexity sensors that have limited access to computational resources. And because it lacks the overhead of other more sophisticated transport protocols, it is suitable for high packet loss wireless networks. Relying on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), CoAP introduces, among other things, confirmable and non-confirmable message types, depending on the nature of the source data. This paper presents a novel analytical model that can relate the application to network packet loss and be used to estimate the effect of lossy wireless channels in CoAP scenarios. Moreover, the model is ultimately validated by an experimental framework in which theoretical and experimental results are compared.