title: Flexible unicast-based group communication for CoAP-enabled devices.
abstract: Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. Applications often require concurrent interactions with several of these objects and their resources. Existing solutions have several limitations in terms of reliability, flexibility and manageability of such groups of objects. To overcome these limitations we propose an intermediately level of intelligence to easily manipulate a group of resources across multiple smart objects, building upon the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). We describe the design of our solution to create and manipulate a group of CoAP resources using a single client request. Furthermore we introduce the concept of profiles for the created groups. The use of profiles allows the client to specify in more detail how the group should behave. We have implemented our solution and demonstrate that it covers the complete group life-cycle, i.e., creation, validation, flexible usage and deletion. Finally, we quantitatively analyze the performance of our solution and compare it against multicast-based CoAP group communication. The results show that our solution improves reliability and flexibility with a trade-off in increased communication overhead.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University - iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 Bus 201, Ghent 9050, Belgium. isam.ishaq@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Isam
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Ishaq
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University - iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 Bus 201, Ghent 9050, Belgium. jeroen.hoebeke@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Jeroen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hoebeke
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University - iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 Bus 201, Ghent 9050, Belgium. floris.vandenabeele@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Floris
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Van den Abeele
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University - iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 Bus 201, Ghent 9050, Belgium. jen.rossey@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Jen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rossey
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University - iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 Bus 201, Ghent 9050, Belgium. ingrid.moerman@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Ingrid
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Moerman
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University - iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 Bus 201, Ghent 9050, Belgium. piet.demeester@intec.ugent.be.
authors.forename: Piet
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Demeester