5. Intermediaries

A client may be interested in a resource in the namespace of a server that is reached through a chain of one or more CoAP intermediaries. In this case, the client registers its interest with the first intermediary towards the server, acting as if it was communicating with the server itself, as specified in Section 3. It is the task of this intermediary to provide the client with a current representation of the target resource and to keep the representation updated upon changes to the resource state, as specified in Section 4.

To perform this task, the intermediary SHOULD make use of the protocol specified in this document, taking the role of the client and registering its own interest in the target resource with the next hop towards the server. If the response returned by the next hop doesn't include an Observe Option, the intermediary MAY resort to polling the next hop or MAY itself return a response without an Observe Option.

The communication between each pair of hops is independent; each hop in the server role MUST determine individually how many notifications to send, of which message type, and so on. Each hop MUST generate its own values for the Observe Option in notifications and MUST set the value of the Max-Age Option according to the age of the local current representation.

If two or more clients have registered their interest in a resource with an intermediary, the intermediary MUST register itself only once with the next hop and fan out the notifications it receives to all registered clients. This relieves the next hop from sending the same notifications multiple times and thus enables scalability.

An intermediary is not required to act on behalf of a client to observe a resource; an intermediary MAY observe a resource, for example, just to keep its own cache up to date.

See Appendix A.2 for examples.