A session initiation protocol for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of billions of constrained devices, denoted as “smart objects”, in an Internet-like structure. Smart objects typically feature limited capabilities in terms of computation and memory and operate in constrained environments, such as low-power lossy networks. As the Internet Protocol (IP) has been foreseen as the standard for communications in IoT, an effort to bring IP connectivity to smart objects and define suitable communication protocols (i.e. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)) is being carried out within standardization organizations, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In this paper, we propose a constrained version of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), named “CoSIP”, whose intent is to allow constrained devices to instantiate communication sessions in a lightweight and standard fashion. Session instantiation can include a negotiation phase of some parameters which will be used for all subsequent communication. CoSIP can be adopted in several application scenarios, such as service discovery and publish/subscribe applications, which are detailed. An evaluation of the proposed protocol is also presented, based on a Java implementation of CoSIP, to show the benefits that its adoption can bring about, in terms of compression rate with the existing SIP protocol and message overhead compared with the use of CoAP.