Dynamic Aggregation and Scheduling in CoAP/Observe-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are starting to have a high impact on our societies and, for next generation WSNs to become more integrated with the Internet, researchers recently proposed to embed IPv6 into such very constrained networks. Also, constraint application protocol (CoAP) and Observe have been proposed for RESTful services to be provided. CoAP/Observe supports the use of caches/proxies and, for this reason, an observation request may resort to multiple client/server registration steps in order to get notifications. Here, we propose to plan the multiple registration steps, at proxies, of multiple observation requests in order to make proper aggregation/scheduling of notifications for transmission. This leads to less energy consumption and to an effective use of bandwidth, avoiding energy depletion of nodes, and increasing the network lifetime. Besides, mathematically formalizing the problem, a heuristic approach is developed and a discussion on how to incorporate algorithm’s decision into the network is done. The proposed framework can be applied to multiple application domains (e.g., monitoring, machine to machine).