Constrained Application Protocol
Constrained Application Protocol
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Constrained Application Protocol

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Constrained Application Protocol

Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a specialized UDP-based Internet application protocol for constrained devices, as defined in RFC 7252 (published in 2014). It enables those constrained devices called "nodes" to communicate with the wider Internet using similar protocols. CoAP is designed for use between devices on the same constrained network (e.g., low-power, lossy networks), between devices and general nodes on the Internet, and between devices on different constrained networks both joined by an internet. CoAP is also being used via other mechanisms, such as SMS on mobile communication networks.

CoAP is an application-layer protocol that is intended for use in resource-constrained Internet devices, such as wireless sensor network nodes. CoAP is designed to easily translate to HTTP for simplified integration with the web, while also meeting specialized requirements such as multicast support, very low overhead, and simplicity. Multicast, low overhead, and simplicity are important for Internet of things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, which tend to be embedded and have much less memory and power supply than traditional Internet devices have. Therefore, efficiency is very important. CoAP can run on most devices that support UDP or a UDP analogue.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Constrained RESTful Environments Working Group (CoRE) has done the major standardization work for this protocol. In order to make the protocol suitable to IoT and M2M applications, various new functions have been added.

The core of the protocol is specified in RFC 7252. Various extensions have been proposed, particularly:

CoAP makes use of two message types, requests and responses, using a simple, binary header format. CoAP is by default bound to UDP and optionally to DTLS, providing a high level of communications security. When bound to UDP, the entire message must fit within a single datagram. When used with 6LoWPAN as defined in RFC 4944, messages should fit into a single IEEE 802.15.4 frame to minimize fragmentation.

The smallest CoAP message is 4 bytes in length, if the token, options and payload fields are omitted, i.e. if it only consists of the CoAP header. The header is followed by the token value (0 to 8 bytes) which may be followed by a list of options in an optimized type–length–value format. Any bytes after the header, token and options (if any) are considered the message payload, which is prefixed by the one-byte "payload marker" (0xFF). The length of the payload is implied by the datagram length.

The first 4 bytes are mandatory in all CoAP datagrams, they constitute the fixed-size header.

These fields can be extracted from these 4 bytes in C via these macros:

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