Comparative Study of Communication Protocols in the IoT

Abstract

The Internet of Things is defined as the creation of various objects connected to the Internet. This includes phones, refrigerators, traffic systems, smart homes, street lights, and even people themselves, as these objects can communicate with each other and perform various tasks without human intervention. The goal of this technology is to improve the individual's life, make it safer and more comfortable, and help save time and effort. IoT technologies find applications in many fields such as healthcare, agriculture, industry, selfdriving cars, homes, smart cities, etc. Because IoT devices are small, limited in power, processing power, and battery life, and rely on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that have low bandwidth and unreliable connections, many of these devices cannot guarantee efficient and acceptable communication. To improve IoT communications, several protocols have been proposed at the application layer (MQTT, AMQP, CoAP, etc.), and due to this diversity of (non-standard) protocols, choosing an application protocol is not easy. This work aim is to help users to choose a communication protocol, by the study of the two most commonly used protocols: CoAP and MQTT-sn. In this study we have evaluated the two parameters: Power consumption, and throughput using the COOJA simulator, in deferent scenarios so a user can discover the protocols performance.