Low-Latency CoAP Processing in FPGA for the Internet of Things

A prominent characteristic of Internet of Things is the seamless integration of diverse, heterogeneous technologies working together to empower cyber-physical spaces and experiences, effectively changing how we perceive the environment around us. Myriads of applications supported by IoT require diverse communication patterns and network requirements. Although IoT infrastructure is often associated to high latency communication, a significant number of applications demand low latency - Augmented Reality and Industrial IoT, for instance. A considerable amount of embedded devices' processing power is dedicated to performing network message exchanges. Thus, speeding up their execution while alleviating the CPU load is crucial and has a beneficial impact to the whole IoT application. In this paper, we present a design and implementation of a CoAP Accelerator as a hardware module synthesizable in an FPGA, and a companion programming model. The accelerator cooperates with the device's CPU and/or other embedded hard-ware, enabling the entire IoT device to sustain high protocol processing rates at low latency. Evaluations were carried out and have demonstrated the endpoint's performance improvement on the order of 308%.