Reliable Transport for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) over Negative-Acknowledgment Oriented Reliable Multicast (NORM)

In this paper, we leverage the well-known Californium CoAP code set maintained by the Eclipse Foundation, as well as the Negative-Acknowledgment Oriented Reliable Multicast (NORM) code set implemented by the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and propose a reliable MANET transport protocol denoted CoAP over NORM (CoNORM). Our protocol design introduces three distinct transport types to CoAP: Data Object Transport, File Transfer Transport, and Stream Transport. The proposed scheme also provides for reliable multicast transport. To validate our designed protocol, we conduct a performance evaluation in an emulation environment with Hardware-In-The-Loop (HITL) implementation. Our performance results demonstrate that CoNORM outperforms CoAP over UDP with respect to hop counts, mobility patterns, and packet loss, in addition to providing reliable multicasting, file transferring, and streaming capabilities.