Formal specification, verification and evaluation of the MQTT protocol in the Internet of Things

This paper presents the formal modeling and performance analysis of one of Internet of Things (IoT) protocols. The Internet of Things is among the subjects best financed in the industry and studied in the academic world. The rapid evolution of mobile Internet, the manufacture of mini hardware, microcomputer, and machine-to-machine (M2M) enabled IoT technologies to be at the top of media subjects. These technologies allow things or devices that are not computers to act intelligently and to make collaborative decisions that are beneficial for certain applications. Hence, the intelligent decision making, the self configuration and the ad hoc networking are from the main characteristics of IoT. Therefore, the implementation of protocols for IoT must comply the standards and satisfy the good properties. Using formal methods in the study of developed protocols ensure these conditions. In this paper, we use probabilistic timed automata for the formal modeling of Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and we use further statistical model checking of UPPAAL SMC tool-set for the performance evaluation of the protocol.