Implementation and Performance Analysis of QUIC Protocol in IoT Monitoring Networks

The Internet of Things is changing our daily lives by linking devices and items to the Internet, allowing them to collect, transfer, and analyze massive amounts of data. As the IoT ecosystem grows, the demand for quick, secure, and dependable communication protocols becomes increasingly urgent, especially on real time monitoring solutions. In response to these needs, the QUIC protocol is being explored as a viable alternative to existing Internet transport protocols in IoT applications. Originally created for HTTP/3, QUIC includes capabilities like reduced latency, multiplexing to overcome head-of-line blocking of TCP, and connection migration via connection IDs. These properties make QUIC an attractive solution for improving IoT devices connectivity. In real-time monitoring environments, the reliability and security of data transfer are vital, as they can severely affect the interpretation of the collected data. Hence, this article focuses on deploying the QUIC protocol in IoT monitoring systems, comparing its performance to well-known IoT protocols like HTTP, UDP, MQTT, and CoAP. The goal is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of QUIC, identify ideal use cases, and compare it to competing protocols in real-world IoT implementations. Thus, this work aims to serve as both an implementation guide and a clarification of the potential that the QUIC protocol may hold in monitoring environments. The development foundation was Node.js, and the implementation was based on GQUIC (Google QUIC). The analysis was focused on packet loss and average Round Trip Time (RTT) and the obtained results proved that QUIC protocol is suitable solution for IoT monitoring networks.