CoAP network nodes may leverage context awareness to take autonomous action to adjust network operations. Context-aware procedures may be pre-configured, established by management entities, or negotiated between nodes, and include parameters for the monitoring and evaluation of data, as well has triggers for taking action. By monitoring requests to observe a resource, a node may determine when a resource should transition to multicast or unicast notification, and dynamically manage multicast group membership based on observation registrations and/or cancellations. By monitoring resource requests, a proxy may determine when to proactively refresh a cached representation of a resource. By monitoring timeouts and/or retransmissions, a client may dynamically adjust a timeout value to optimize communications.