MQTT Over QUIC: Comparison with TCP and TCP+TLS in a Virtualized IoT Environment

IoT applications require reliable, efficient, and secure communication due to their distributed and resource-constrained nature. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is widely adopted in these environments for its lightweight design, requiring minimal resources and optimizing network bandwidth. However, it still faces performance issues due to TCP and Transport Layer Security (TLS) overhead. Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) has emerged as a promising alternative to improve communication performance. However, existing performance studies lack evaluations of MQTT over QUIC under low latency and unstable network conditions. This paper compares the performance of MQTT over QUIC, TCP, and TCP+TLS in a virtualized IoT environment. The performance evaluation follows a well-established approach and analyses latency and connection establishment time as key metrics under stable and unstable conditions. Results highlight the potential of QUIC as an efficient and secure alternative for IoT communication.