Improving service management in the internet of things

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) research arena, many efforts are devoted to adapt the existing IP standards to emerging IoT nodes. This is the direction followed by three Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Working Groups, which paved the way for research on IP-based constrained networks. Through a simplification of the whole TCP/IP stack, resource constrained nodes become direct interlocutors of application level entities in every point of the network. In this paper we analyze some side effects of this solution, when in the presence of large amounts of data to transmit. In particular, we conduct a performance analysis of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a widely accepted web transfer protocol for the Internet of Things, and propose a service management enhancement that improves the exploitation of the network and node resources. This is specifically thought for constrained nodes in the abovementioned conditions and proves to be able to significantly improve the node energetic performance when in the presence of large resource representations (hence, large data transmissions). © 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.