A Constrained Monitoring Protocol for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Network monitoring has been traditionally conducted using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP): a network monitoring protocol that allows network administrators to keep track of every node in the network and ensure that it behaves correctly. This paper presents the Constrained Monitored Protocol (CoMP): a lightweight resource-efficient alternative to SNMP that targets the low-end devices of the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices are characterised by severe resource constraints in terms of memory, processing power, and bandwidth. Moreover, they are often energy-constrained as well, powered either by small batteries or energy harvesting. While SNMP does work with these devices, it has an unnecessary overhead resulting in a waste of resources that could otherwise be used for some other task, or to save energy. Furthermore, this paper proposes a cross-protocol CoMP-SNMP proxy that operates at the border router of the resource-constrained network and enables the efficient monitoring of resource-constrained IoT devices using CoMP from existing SNMP-based network monitoring infrastructures.