FASOR Retransmission Timeout and Congestion Control Mechanism for CoAP

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been designed to be used on constrained devices such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The existing congestion control algorithms for CoAP have known shortcomings in addressing congestion and retaining a good level of performance when link errors occur. In this paper, we propose Fast-Slow RTO (FASOR) mechanism that takes into account special needs in wireless environments while still properly addressing congestion. We run a series of experiments to confirm that FASOR is able to successfully cope with challenging network conditions such as bufferbloat, high level of congestion, and high link-error rates unlike the default and CoCoA congestion control that have severe problems with bufferbloated congestion.Peer reviewe

Advanced Congestion Control Mechanisms for Internet of Things

The number of IoT devices is growing at high speed, around 18 billion devices are forecast by 2022. Many of these devices are implemented with simple hardware, with low specifications and low resources. Taking into account the limited hardware resources and the huge network formed by IoT devices, CoAP was born as a lighter application protocol than HTTP. One important task for this scenario is the congestion control of huge networks using simple hardware devices. CoAP implements a simple congestion control solution, but many research articles show that this solution is not very efficient and it could be improved using other congestion control algorithms. CoCoA was born with the aim of being the standard congestion control algorithm for CoAP and has been proven through many studies, that it improves CoAP default performance in several scenarios. However, some research articles show that CoCoA offers low performance in bufferbloat scenarios. This thesis evaluates CoCoA in bufferbloat scenarios and introduces changes on CoCoA algorithm, achieving an improvement on its performance

A Survey on Congestion Control Protocols for CoAP

The Internet of things (IoT) comprises things interconnected through the internet with unique identities. Congestion management is one of the most challenging tasks in networks. The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a low-footprint protocol designed for IoT networks and has been defined by IETF. In IoT networks, CoAP nodes have limited network and battery resources. The CoAP standard has an exponential backoff congestion control mechanism. This backoff mechanism may not be adequate for all IoT applications. The characteristics of each IoT application would be different. Further, the events such as unnecessary retransmissions and packet collision caused due to links with high losses and packet transmission errors may lead to network congestion. Various congestion handling algorithms for CoAP have been defined to enrich the performance of IoT applications. Our paper presents a comprehensive survey on the evolution of the congestion control mechanism used in IoT networks. We have classified the protocols into RTO-based, queue-monitoring, and rate-based. We review congestion avoidance protocols for CoAP networks and discuss directions for future work