Performances of M2M Protocols in Internet of Medical Things

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a constantly developing idea that aims to connect the medical IoT devices used in the healthcare industry. IoMT devices use their environment to detect, collect and send vital information about the medical parameters of a user/patient. This data can be then used for health monitoring of patients remotely and predicting their health conditions. Now, in order to transmit this huge amount of data and information IoT devices need to adopt certain machine-to-machine (M2M) communication protocols. In IoMT, it is very much crucial to choose the right protocol for the communication of critical data. In this paper, we are evaluating the performances of the four most widely used M2M protocols such as - Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), in terms of packet size and Round Trip Time (RTT) which are two essential factors in terms of transmission of medical data. Performances of these protocols are tested in an IoMT kit developed using several medical as well as general purpose sensors. We also compare the protocols based on their security and QoS features for their suitability to IoMT. Based on the experimental results and feature comparisons, MQTT proves to be the most suitable M2M protocol for IoMT.