Analysis of application layer protocols in internet of things

Abstract

In the vision of Internet of Things (IoT), everyday objects such as domestic appliances, actuators and embedded systems of any kind soon will be connected with each other using Internet. Especially, with the emerging trends and devices evolving in this technology, choosing an optimized communication protocol for a particular application scenario is highly essential. Hence, in this work an analysis of existing communication protocols namely IETF Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), IBM Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and W3C HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was carried out to understand their significance and classify them based on the application scenario. To perform a real-time analysis of these protocols, a test environment for inventory management system is designed. It involves sensors and communication boards, which generates data about the availability status of the every product. Various test cases were executed on all the three protocols by varying the request types in the process of retrieving the sensor data. To justify the performance of each protocol, metrics such as response time, latency and throughput are determined and analyzed. Finally, using the obtained results the protocols were classified and justified that each protocol works optimized for particular request type.