ECTX-CoAP : An Enhanced Context-Aware CoAP Extension for Smart Objects Discovery in Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things(IoT) can be defined as the network of physical objects, which may be anything like physical devices, automobiles, appliances, animals or even people, all connected directly or indirectly with each other, able to share and exchange data [6]. These physical objects after getting connected to the Internet can provide smart services and are therefore known as smart objects. For the realization of IoT, it is necessary for the smart objects to discover and interact each other without human intervention. The number of smart objects connected to IoT are increasing at a rapid rate, creating an overhead for the users of controlling these many smart objects. One smart solution to this problem is the use of Context-Aware Communication. This work aims to propose Enhanced Context-Aware CoAP Extension for smart objects discovery in Internet of Things (IoT), namely ECTX-CoAP, which is enhancement of CoAP-CTX [2]. CoAP-CTX is able to do Context-Aware discovery of smart objects but at the cost of discovery response time. The enhancement to CoAP-CTX is made by first, reducing discovery response time, comparable to CoAP and second, by adding the concept of Group Communication functionality to it other than multi-casting. The proposed ECTX-CoAP is implemented in Contiki using Cooja simulator. The experimental results show that the proposed enhancement has successfully reduced the discovery time and number of messages exchanged, also allowing users to access a group of smart objects efficiently.