An Enhanced File Transfer Mechanism Using an Additional Blocking Communication Channel and Thread for IoT Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an enhanced file transfer mechanism for a communication framework (CM) for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Our previous file transfer method uses a basic non-blocking communication channel and thread for the CM (non-blocking method), but this method has a cost of adding additional bytes to each original file block. Therefore, it is not suitable for the transfer of large-sized files. Other existing file transfer methods use a separate channel to transfer large-sized files. However, the creation of a separate channel increases the total transmission delay as the transfer frequency increases. The proposed method uses a dedicated blocking communication channel in a separate thread (blocking method). The blocking method uses a separate channel and thread which are dedicated to transferring file blocks. As it creates the separate channel in advance before the file transfer task, the proposed method does not have an additional channel creation cost at the moment of the file transfer. Through file transfer experiments, the blocking method showed a shorter file transfer time than the non-blocking method, and the transmission delay was increased as the file size grew. By supporting both non-blocking and blocking methods, an application can flexibly select the desirable method according to its requirement. If the application requires the transfer of small-sized files infrequently, it can use the non-blocking method. If the application needs to transfer small-sized or large-sized files frequently, a good alternative is to use the blocking method.