Protocols based on UDP transport imply that the connection may not be inherently reliable. To compensate for reliability issues, CoAP introduces two message types that differ by either requiring acknowledgment or not. An additional feature of this approach is that messages can be asynchronous.
In total there are only four messages in CoAP:
- Confirmable (CON): Requires an ACK. If a CON message is sent an ACK must be received within a random time interval between ACK_TIMEOUT and (ACK_TIMEOUT * ACK_RANDOM_FACTOR). If the ACK is not received, the sender transmits the CON message over and over at exponentially increasing intervals until it receives the ACK or a RST. This essentially is the CoAP form of congestion control. There ...
