Data Aggregation Gateway Framework for CoAP Group Communications

In this paper, a data aggregation gateway framework (DA-GW) for constrained application protocol (CoAP) group communications is proposed. The DA-GW framework is designed to improve the throughput performance and energy efficiency of group communication to monitor and control multiple sensor devices collectively with a single user terminal. The DA-GW consists of four function blocks—the message analyzer, group manager, message scheduler and data handler—and three informative databases—the client database, resource database and information database. The DA-GW performs group management and group communication through each functional block and stores resources in the informative databases. The DA-GW employs international standard-based data structures and provides the interoperability of heterogeneous devices used in various applications. The DA-GW is implemented using a Java-based open source framework called jCoAP to evaluate the functions and performance of the DA-GW. The experiment results showed that the DA-GW framework revealed better performance than existing group communication methods in terms of throughput and energy consumption.