Networking small devices

One of major challenges for IoT and machine-to-machine communication is the connectivity of constrained devices to IP networks. The networking research in TiViT Internet of Things SHOK program has concentrated especially for arranging IP connectivity and data delivery with resource constrained sensor devices, which do not always support required network protocols by definition. During the first year the project concentrated on building and optimizing the communication network solutions to optimize the power efficiency of devices and to support so called “sleeping nodes”. The work focused on Representational State Transfer (REST) based Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) web transfer protocol to arrange the end-to-end connectivity of constrained sensor nodes and services. Since majority of current sensor devices does not support networking protocols such as IP (Internet Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol), which are required for CoAP, the project defined and developed also solutions for CoAP gateway to be used with energy optimized protocols and sleepy devices as well as improved the communication between the CoAP gateway and end-user applications. In this article we provide an overview of developed communication architecture and demonstrated solutions for networking small IoT devices.