Performance evaluation of IoT protocols under a constrained wireless access network

One of the challenges faced by today's Internet of Things (IoT) is to efficiently support machine-to-machine communication, given that the remote sensors and the gateway devices are connected through low bandwidth, unreliable, or intermittent wireless communication links. In this paper, we quantitatively compare the performance of IoT protocols, namely MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol), DDS (Data Distribution Service) and a custom UDP-based protocol in a medical setting. The performance of the protocols was evaluated using a network emulator, allowing us to emulate a low bandwidth, high system latency, and high packet loss wireless access network. This paper reports the observed performance of the protocols and arrives at the conclusion that although DDS results in higher bandwidth usage than MQTT, its superior performance with regard to data latency and reliability makes it an attractive choice for medical IoT applications and beyond.