Bidirectional CoAP

I mentioned before that CoAP would seem to be a good protocol to implement FOREST over, as most implementations implement the observe spec.

CoAP is based on HTTP, thus inherits its asymmetric client-server model. However, it is also built over UDP, which is another loosening up of HTTP in CoAP that can help implement FOREST. FOREST's basic mode of interaction is peer-to-peer, with clients able to be servers and vice-versa.

So if I use CoAP, I'll have UDP packets for requests going in both directions between peers, and UDP packets for responses also going back in each direction. Even though CoAP isn't specified to be bidirectional, I could easily implement a bidirectional version of it once I have a unidirectional implementation.

If the code is all in NetMash, which is used on both clients and servers, then the bottom of the CoAP stack will be simply sending and receiving UDP packets: there's no separate TCP connection in each direction. You could have a single UDP port number at each end.

If you need to keep receiving updates to your cache of a response to an earlier request (which it seems is a feature being added to HTTP/2), then you're already getting towards a bidirectional protocol, since a spontaneous packet can now come back at the client instead of it always being the initiator.

I played with such a bidirectional protocol of my own for an earlier version of the Object Net, back in 2005, but then switched to using just dual HTTP channels and long-polling to cover asymmetric infrastructure. It's nice to be able to re-visit the concept with the IoT and CoAP.