A Proactive Trickle-based Mechanism for Discovering CoRE Resource Directories

The CoRE working group at the IETF has proposed a Resource Directory (RD) solution to facilitate the discovery of the resources provided by constrained wireless sensor and actuator networks. For such a mechanism to be effectively deployable, nodes must first discover the existence of an RD in the network before being able to exploit its functionalities. This paper presents Proactive RD Discovery (PRD); a scalable, reliable, and effective mechanism to discover an RD. To achieve such qualities, the proposed mechanism deploys adaptive Trickle timers. PRD is implemented in Contiki OS and evaluated using emulated sensor/actuator nodes in the Cooja simulator. Simulation results show important performance enhancements in terms of energy consumption, generated traffic, RD discovery time, and reliability when compared with the default discovery mechanism bundled with the RD.