Bluetooth Low Energy Based CoAP Communication in IoT CoAPNonIP: An Architecture Grants CoAP in Wireless Personal Area Network

Abstract

In recent years, the development of smart devices has led to the Internet of Things (IoT). In IoT, the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a well-known protocol used in constrained networks. CoAP aims to work in IP-based networks. However, there are many constrained devices using different scenarios to transfer data. For example, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices use the Media Access Control (MAC) address as an identifier and use Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) to transfer data. Therefore, how to overcome those barriers is an important topic. There are several approaches to overcome those barriers. For example, a new hardware component can be added to make those devices support TCP/IP protocol stacks, then CoAP can easily be implemented in those devices. On the other hand, an application layer architecture can be added upon existing communication technologies to support CoAP. Considering to minimize the changes of underlying communication infrastructure, the second approach can achieve the goal with less effort.

This thesis proposes an architecture that apply CoAP to different Non-IP based communication technologies. Meanwhile, Bluetooth Low Energy is used to explore how to overcome limitations of underlying technology. By adopting the proposed architecture, existing devices can participate in the IoT through CoAP without extra hardware upgrade or hardware modification. Although experiments show that the current implementation of the proposed architecture has relatively low data rate, the problem can be solved via ​changing the factory settings of BLE devices. Compared with the hardware solution, the proposed architecture takes less effort to support different underlying technologies and platforms.