Comparison and Evaluation of LwM2M and MQTT in Low-Power Wide-Area Networks

This paper investigates and compares the performance of the currently two most popular protocols for IoT applications LwM2M and MQTT when operating over LTE-M and NB-IoT. The experiments consider the traffi-cover-the-air generated by the two IoT protocols monitoring packets and number of bytes exchanged. Measurements of the average energy consumption show how LwM2M and MQTT influence the operational time of the end-devices in typical IoT use cases. It is investigated how authentication methods as well as cellular network properties affect the protocol efficiency. Finally, some general recommendations for best practice assignment of the LwM2M and MQTT protocols in cIoT networks are given.