Automated Discovery of CoAP-enabled IoT devices

This paper presents the design and implementation of a framework that allows for the automated discovery of IoT devices. We discuss how to properly combine a set of discovery mechanisms used in the framework of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) in order to estabilish relations between CoAP-enabled devices. Such relations represent links that are `tracked' by an ad-hoc implemented CoAP Crawler, which inspects the served resource state and chooses the link to follow from there, working as a Hypermedia-driven client. The Crawler is itself a Web-enabled device that dynamically draws an overlay network topology in which resources are represented as nodes and inter-device relationships as edges between pairs of nodes. This approach allows for the creation of a completely distributed, non-hierarchical, Peer-to-Peer overlay network. A Proof-Of-Concept implementation of the framework is described and preliminary performance evaluation results, in terms of response time and throughput with increasing network size conditions, are discussed.