FASOR Retransmission Timeout and Congestion Control Mechanism for CoAP

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been designed to be used on constrained devices such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The existing congestion control algorithms for CoAP have known shortcomings in addressing congestion and retaining a good level of performance when link errors occur. In this paper, we propose Fast-Slow RTO (FASOR) mechanism that takes into account special needs in wireless environments while still properly addressing congestion. We run a series of experiments to confirm that FASOR is able to successfully cope with challenging network conditions such as bufferbloat, high level of congestion, and high link-error rates unlike the default and CoCoA congestion control that have severe problems with bufferbloated congestion.