ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Pervasive Computing : Distributed Systems : Education : Student Projects : Abstract

Enriching IoT Cloud Platforms with CoAP (B)

Status: Abgeschlossen

Abstract—Cloud computing facilitates application development and maintenance by providing essential components as services. SicsthSense is a Cloud-based Integration platform to foster Internet of Things applications by providing a wide spectrum of device connectivity and a convenient Web API. For this, it is still missing support for the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a new Web protocol especially designed for resource-constrained devices. This work integrates CoAP support into SicsthSense and elaborates on new prospects that result from the integration.

Background

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a RESTful protocol standardized by the IETF to inte-grate the most resource-constrained devices into the IP-based Internet of Things (IoT). This development was driven by the need for an application layer protocol for constrained networks that would allow even very small devices, like sensors, switches, and valves, to directly exchange data with endpoints on the Internet. Today there exist many proprietary network protocols for the communication with embedded systems. However, they split up the world into many technological islands. Using CoAP would overcome these islands to build the IoT while presenting well-known patterns to the developers through CoAP’s similarity to HTTP.

SicsthSense is a Cloud platform for the system integration of the full spectrum of different sensing and actuation devices by various manufacturers. The platform further facilitates application development by providing key features such as push and pull for data acquisition, a consistent data schema for the various manufacturers, visualization of collected and statistical data, sharing data streams, and a data processing model. SicsthSense is based on the play! framework and uses a combination of Scala and Java to implement device connectivity, the Web frontend, and the Web API for applications.

Today, SicsthSense only supports HTTP for data exchange. To allow resource constrained devices to send their data to SicsthSense with CoAP a proxy server is required. Integrating CoAP into SicsthSense would allow for direct communication with a growing population of devices. Furthermore, the platform can relay CoAP requests and perform an HTTP mapping with features that go far beyond a normal cross-proxy, e.g., access control and content transcoding. Platform users could for instance allow access with a sharing mechanism similar to social networks.

Objectives

In a first step, the student shall integrate the Californium (Cf) CoAP framework with SicsthSense, so that CoAP devices can be polled, observed, and controlled by request through the Web API.

In a second step, SicsthSense shall be enhanced by additional features, starting with HTTP-CoAP cross-proxy support with access control lists based on SicsthSense accounts. Other features may include support for an additional protocol such as MQTT or a possibility to implement application logic.

In a final step, the student shall evaluate the realized system with metrics such as round-trip times for requests and throughput compared to existing HTTP-CoAP cross-proxies.