Lightweight Session Initiation for the Internet of Things

In the next few years the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to bring together billions of devices, denoted as "smart objects", thus creating an extremely large-scale network of heterogeneous devices, which will provide an unprecedented opportunity to build new applications and forms of interactions that will shape the world. The heterogeneous and dynamic nature of smart objects that will form the IoT requires the design and adoption of standard communication models and protocols in order to enable interoperability and long-term evolution of deployed systems. Much attention must be therefore paid on the adoption of lightweight and low-overhead communications intended to minimize energy-consumption and processing load. While the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is intended to bring the REST paradigm to smart objects, there are many application scenarios that might benefit from the use of sessions (i.e., an exchange of data between an association of participants). In this paper, we introduce a lightweight Session Initiation Protocol targeted to constrained environments, based on CoAP, which re-uses the syntax and semantics of CoAP in order to create, modify, and terminate sessions among smart objects with minimal overhead.