Performance Evaluation of Application Layer Protocols for the Internet-of-Things

Over the last years, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has been increased. To provide a suitable machine-to-machine communication across the applications, specific application layer protocols are used. In contrast to traditional protocols like HTTP, IoT protocols are designed to transfer information through unreliable, low bandwidth networks. This paper compares the performance of the protocols Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) in the context of a monitoring business application. For that purpose, a three-layered test-bed is designed with a variable latency and Packet-Loss-Rate (PLR). MQTT performs best regarding the characteristics bandwidth usage, reliability, latency and throughput. AMQP performs worse than MQTT comparing the bandwidth usage and throughput. In contrast, XMPP has the worst values in all categories.