Using Provenance and CoAP to track Requests/Responses in IoT

Until recently, not much attention has been drawn to the need to provide documentary evidence for ensuring reliability, transparency and, most importantly, tracing the source of requests/responses in the Internet of Things. The knowledge of provenance is considered as a key component in establishing the above-mentioned issues. Most research, to a large extent, focus on requesting data, which is based on user inference and decision making, by utilising provenance information. However, little or nothing has been done regarding requests and responses and, most importantly, from the machine perspective. Consequently, this paper proposes a light-weight prototype system for tracing the source of requests/responses using provenance information over CoAP in the Internet of Things. We also provide performance evaluation of the prototypic system using metrics such as response time (ms) and throughput (KB/s). Finally, findings from our experiment are presented and discussed.