Distributed CoAP Handover Using Distributed Mobility Agents in Internet-of-Things Networks

The constrained application protocol (CoAP) can be used for remotely controlling various sensor devices in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In CoAP, to support the handover of a mobile sensor device, service discovery and message transmission needs to be repeated, although doing so would increase the handover delay significantly. To address this limitation of CoAP, a centralized CoAP scheme has been proposed. However, it tends to result in performance degradation for an inter-domain handover case. In this letter, we propose a distributed CoAP handover scheme to support the inter-domain handover. In the proposed scheme, a distributed mobility agent (DMA) is used for managing the location of mobile sensors in a domain and performing handover control operations with its neighboring DMAs in a distributed manner. A performance comparison reveals that the proposed scheme offers a performance improvement of up to 29.5% in terms of the handover delay.