Retrieving monitoring and accounting information from constrained devices in internet-of-things applications

Abstract

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is envisioned to provide connectiv- ity to a vast number of sensing or actuating devices with limited com- putational and communication capabilities. For the organizations that manage these constrained devices, the monitoring of each device's oper- ational status and performance level as well as the accounting of their re- source usage are of great importance. However, monitoring and account- ing support is lacking in today's IoT platforms. Hence, this paper stud- ies the applicability of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a lightweight transfer protocol under development by IETF, for eciently retrieving monitoring and accounting data from constrained devices. On the infrastructure side, the developed prototype relies on using stan- dard building blocks oered by the AMAAIS project in order to collect, pre-process, distribute, and persistently store monitoring and account- ing information. Necessary on-device and infrastructure components are prototypically implemented and empirically evaluated in a realistic sim- ulation environment. Experiment results indicate that CoAP is suited for eciently transferring monitoring and accounting data, both due to a small energy footprint and a memory-wise compact implementation.