Forward error correction in real-time Internet of things CoAP-based wireless sensor networks

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed and promoted several standards intended to facilitate Internet of things communication among constrained devices in low-power low-rate networks (LLNs). Specifically, IETF introduces a series of protocols that deal with different layers of the stack ranging from IPv6 adaptation to routing in LLN. Among them, the constrained application protocol (CoAP) is a session protocol that is used to carry sensor and actuator traffic. Since CoAP transport relies on the user datagram protocol, and in order to provide reliability, it introduces a mode operation known as confirmable where messages are considered delivered once they have been acknowledged. One drawback of this approach, however, is the latency that results from the retransmission of packets in lossy networks. In this study, the authors present, model, compare and evaluate a forward error correction mechanism that enables CoAP to improve its reliability while reducing latency.