A Performance Analysis of Internet of Things Networking Protocols: Evaluating MQTT, CoAP, OPC UA
1
Cognitive and People-Centric Research Unit (COPELABS), University Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 1749-024 Lisbon, Portugal
2
Fortiss—Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for Software Intensive Services and Systems, 80805 Munich, Germany
3
Department of Informatics Engineering, University Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 1749-024 Lisbon, Portugal
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Fabrizio Granelli
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(11), 4879; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11114879
Received: 11 May 2021
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Revised: 18 May 2021
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Accepted: 18 May 2021
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Published: 26 May 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue State-of-Art of Network Architectures and Protocols for Industrial IoT)
IoT data exchange is supported today by different communication protocols and different protocolar frameworks, each of which with its own advantages and disadvantages, and often co-existing in a way that is mandated by vendor policies. Although different protocols are relevant in different domains, there is not a protocol that provides better performance (jitter, latency, energy consumption) across different scenarios. The focus of this work is two-fold. First, to provide a comparison of the different available solutions in terms of protocolar features such as type of transport, type of communication pattern support, security aspects, including Named-data networking as relevant example of an Information-centric networking architecture. Secondly, the work focuses on evaluating three of the most popular protocols used both in Consumer as well as in Industrial IoT environments: MQTT, CoAP, and OPC UA. The experimentation has been carried out first on a local testbed for MQTT, COAP and OPC UA. Then, larger experiments have been carried out for MQTT and CoAP, based on the large-scale FIT-IoT testbed. Results show that CoAP is the protocol that achieves across all scenarios lowest time-to-completion, while OPC UA, albeit exhibiting less variability, resulted in higher time-to-completion in comparison to CoAP or MQTT.
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Keywords:
Internet of Things; networking protocols; networking architectures; performance evaluation
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MDPI and ACS Style
Silva, D.; Carvalho, L.I.; Soares, J.; Sofia, R.C. A Performance Analysis of Internet of Things Networking Protocols: Evaluating MQTT, CoAP, OPC UA. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 4879. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11114879
AMA Style
Silva D, Carvalho LI, Soares J, Sofia RC. A Performance Analysis of Internet of Things Networking Protocols: Evaluating MQTT, CoAP, OPC UA. Applied Sciences. 2021; 11(11):4879. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11114879
Chicago/Turabian StyleSilva, Daniel, Liliana I. Carvalho, José Soares, and Rute C. Sofia. 2021. "A Performance Analysis of Internet of Things Networking Protocols: Evaluating MQTT, CoAP, OPC UA" Applied Sciences 11, no. 11: 4879. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11114879
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