A Survey on Congestion Control for CoAP over UDP

Abstract

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a specialized web transfer protocol proposed by the IETF for use in IoT environments. CoAP was designed as a lightweight machine-to-machine protocol for resource constrained environments. Due to the strength of low overhead, the number of CoAP devices is expected to rise rapidly. When CoAP runs over UDP for wireless sensor networks, CoAP needs to support congestion control mechanisms. Since the default CoAP defines a minimal mechanism for congestion control, several schemes to improve the mechanism have been proposed. To keep CoAP lightweight, the majority of the schemes have been focused mainly on how to measure RTT accurately and how to set RTO adaptively according to network conditions, but other approaches such as rate-based congestion control were proposed more recently. In this paper, we survey the literature on congestion control for CoAP and discuss the future research directions.