Congestion control for CoAP cloud services

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a new Web protocol for the Internet of Things that allows to connect IoT devices directly to services hosted in the cloud. CoAP is based on UDP to better fit the requirements of constrained environments with resource-constrained nodes and low-power communication links. Being an Internet protocol, CoAP must still adhere to congestion control, primarily to keep the backbone network stable. Thus, the base specification uses conservative parameter values for the number of open requests, the retransmission timers, and the overall message rate. More powerful CoAP nodes, however, can use metrics to optimize these parameters to achieve a better quality of service. For this, the IETF CoRE working group is designing an advanced congestion control mechanism for CoAP called CoCoA. This paper presents first evaluation results for a mechanism that improves the communication between cloud services and resource-constrained IoT devices. We implement CoCoA for the Californium (Cf) CoAP framework and evaluate its performance on a wireless sensor network testbed that runs IPv6. Our results show that CoCoA can better utilize the available network capacity and can increase throughput by 19-112%.