CoAP based IoT data transfer from a Raspberry Pi to Cloud

This paper describes the development of an Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring system using ThingsBoard IoT platform. ThingsBoard is an open source software tool, which is used to collect, monitor and visualise streams of data received in real-time by sensor devices. The platform can be hosted in the cloud and provides Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocols support. MQTT and HTTP protocols have mostly been used to develop various IoT systems. However, this paper investigates the use of the CoAP in transmitting sensor data to the cloud. It aims to explore how CoAP fits into the IoT ecosystem and what advantages it offers over other IoT protocols. A CoAP-based IoT architecture is proposed using a Raspberry Pi (RPi) and sensors acting as IoT endpoints. These endpoints will poll sensors (e.g. temperature and humidity) and using CoAP will send the latest data formatted as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to the ThingsBoard cloud endpoint at regular intervals. ThingsBoard can create real-time IoT Dashboards for sensors data visualization and share it with users.