Comparison of IoT Application Layer Protocols

Abstract

It has been almost 20 years since the concept of the Internet of Things was first proposed. Now, IoT has become a leading technology that is becoming pervasive in our lives. However, behind the wide deployment of IoT services, there is still no consensus on common of IoT protocols and architectures. In this thesis, we study four application layer protocols: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, DDS, which are representative of current practice. We introduce and compare these four protocols on the conceptual level. This study considers the message model, messaging functionality, and security. Moreover, we use several Raspberry Pi's in common IoT protocol test platform to perform performance tests. A series of experiments based on message quantity, message size and transmission frequency have been performed. The test results show the four protocols' messaging capability in term of latency, CPU utilization, and memory usage.