Performance evaluation of CoAP and MQTT with security support for IoT environments

Abstract

World is living an overwhelming explosion of smart devices: electronic gadgets, appliances, meters, cars, sensors, camera and even traffic lights, that are connected to the Internet to extend their capabilities, constituting what is known as Internet of Things (IoT). In these environments, the application layer is decisive for the quality of the connection, which has dependencies to the transport layer, mainly when secure communications are used. This paper analyses the performance offered by these two most popular protocols for the application layer: Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT). This analysis aims to examine the features and capabilities of the two protocols and to determine their feasibility to operate under constrained devices taking into account security support and diverse network conditions, unlike the previous works. Since IoT devices typically show battery constraints, the analysis is focused on bandwidth and CPU use, using realistic network scenarios, since this use translates to power consumption.