Enabling CoAP-Based Communication across Network Boundaries: Challenges and Solutions

The depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses has introduced new challenges in the deployment of the Internet of Things across IPv6 and IPv4 networks. In previous work we developed a CoAP-based transition architecture specifically designed to overcome some of these challenges. In this respect, this article extends that work identifying the most common IoT scenarios and their requirements to successfully achieve seamless cross-domain communication in IoT. Furthermore, an analysis of our architecture and the state-of-the-art network transition technologies is conducted on the basis of those requirements. Among other aspects, the analysis provides new insights of the shortcomings of our architecture. Based on these shortcomings, the article proposes new extensions of the architecture in order to achieve seamless communication across the most common IoT scenarios.