An Experimental Study of Network Coded REST HTTP in Dynamic IoT Systems

Abstract: REST HTTP is the communication protocol of choice for software developers today. In IoT systems with unreliable connectivity, however, a stateless protocol like REST HTTP needs to send a request message multiple times, and it only stops the retransmissions when an acknowledgement arrives at the sender. In our previous work, we studied the usage of random linear network coding (RLNC) for REST HTTP protocol to reducing the amount of unnecessarily retransmissions. In this paper, we experimentally validate the study and analyze REST HTTP with and without RLNC in a simple testbed in dynamic IoT systems. The measurements show notable improvements in bandwidth utilization in terms of reducing the retransmissions and delay when using network-coded REST HTTP.