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6LoWPAN Compressed DTLS for CoAP

Published 1 May 2012
Shahid Raza, Daniele Trabalza, Thiemo Voigt
Citations172

TL;DR

The compressed-DTLS is the first lightweight 6LoWPAN extension for DTLS and it is shown that the proposed DTLS compression significantly reduces the number of additional security bits.

Abstract

Real deployments of the IoT require security. CoAP is being standardized as an application layer protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). CoAP proposes to use DTLS to provide end-to-end security to protect the IoT. DTLS is a heavyweight protocol and its headers are too long to fit in a single IEEE802.15.4 MTU. 6LoWPAN provides header compression mechanisms to reduce the size of upper layer headers. 6LoWPAN header compression mechanisms can be used to compress the security headers as well. In this paper we propose 6LoWPAN header compression for DTLS. We link our compressed DTLS with the 6LoWPAN standard using standardized mechanisms. We show that our proposed DTLS compression significantly reduces the number of additional security bits. For example, only for the DTLS Record header that is added in every DTLS packet, the number of additional security bits can be reduced by 62%. Our compressed-DTLS is the first lightweight 6LoWPAN extension for DTLS.

Keywords

Computer ScienceEngineering