Evaluation of reliable UDP-based transport protocols for Internet of Things (IoT)

For IoT applications that require near real-time wireless connections, the traditional TCP protocol is not adept enough due to the size of its packet header, its conservative Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) congestion control algorithm and its slow start strategy. This paper mainly evaluates three kinds of reliable UDP-based transport protocols namely, RUBDP, UDT, and PA-UDP, for use in IoT applications. The evaluation was done on a test bed that consists of two machines connected by wireless ad-hoc network. We consider the effect of data size by monitoring throughput of the implemented protocol. This paper also discusses the CPU usage on the sender and receiver side of each protocol. The paper findings are, PA-UDP protocol has the best throughput performance but requires high CPU utilization during the start and end of transmission at the receiver side. Meanwhile, UDT protocol is most efficient in term of CPU usage although it provides lesser throughput. RBUDP, on the other hand, performed consistently in wireless network but CPU usage is very high at the sender side. The conclusion drawn on this paper is UDT protocol is the most suitable protocol of the three for IoT applications because it has consistent performance and is CPU friendly.