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Assignment1 Iot

The document discusses several common IoT data communication protocols: MQTT, HTTP, CoAP, DDS, WebSocket, AMQP, XMPP, and OPC UA. MQTT is lightweight and allows communication in unreliable networks using a publish/subscribe model. HTTP is optimized for the web but not IoT due to overhead of individual connections. CoAP is similar to HTTP but optimized for constrained networks. DDS uses a publish-subscribe model without brokers, connecting all devices directly. AMQP and XMPP allow messaging between devices. OPC UA supports industrial communication standards.

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24 views5 pages

Assignment1 Iot

The document discusses several common IoT data communication protocols: MQTT, HTTP, CoAP, DDS, WebSocket, AMQP, XMPP, and OPC UA. MQTT is lightweight and allows communication in unreliable networks using a publish/subscribe model. HTTP is optimized for the web but not IoT due to overhead of individual connections. CoAP is similar to HTTP but optimized for constrained networks. DDS uses a publish-subscribe model without brokers, connecting all devices directly. AMQP and XMPP allow messaging between devices. OPC UA supports industrial communication standards.

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AK
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© © All Rights Reserved
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IoT Communication

Protocols—IoT Data Protocols


IoT Data Communication Protocols
Below you'll find a brief breakdown of the some of the different IoT data
protocols, namely:

 Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT)


 HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
 Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)
 Data Distribution Service (DDS)
 WebSocket
 Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP)
 Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
 OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA)

Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT)


Designed to be lightweight, so it can work in very low bandwidth
networks, MQTT allows communication between nodes in both reliable and
unreliable networks. MQTT follows a publish/subscribe architecture,
meaning that there are nodes (brokers) that make the information available,
while others (clients) can read the available information after subscribing by
accessing the corresponding URL.
A use case of MQTT is in a smart factory where there are temperature
sensors installed along with the production plant. The installed sensors will
connect to the MQTT broker and will publish the data within sensor topics,
as follows:
Afterward, the MQTT clients, which can be of several types and quantities,
will subscribe to the same topic in order to read the temperature data. An
example of an MQTT architecture can be seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1. MQTT's publish/subscribe architecture. Image used courtesy of MQTT

In addition, MQTT defines three levels of quality of service, depending upon


the reliability, from lowest to highest:

 Level 0: there is no guarantee of the message delivery.


 Level 1: the delivery is guaranteed, but it is possible to receive duplicate
messages.
 Level 2: the delivery is guaranteed and there will be no duplicates.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)


This protocol has been the origin of data communication for the World
Wide Web (WWW), so logically it is being used in the IoT world. However, it
is not optimized for it because of the following:

 The HTTP is made for two systems communicating to each other at a


time, not more, so it is time and energy-consuming to connect several
sensors to get information.
 The HTTP is unidirectional, made for one system (client) to be sending
one message to another one (server). This makes it quite hard to
escalate an IoT solution.
 Power consumption: HTTP relies on Transmission Control Protocol
(TCP), which requires a lot of computing resources, so it is not suitable
for battery-powered applications.
Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)
CoAP is a web transfer protocol to be used with limited networks with low
bandwidth and low availability. It follows a client/server architecture and is
built similarly to HTTP, supporting the REST model: servers make resources
available with an URL, and clients can make requests of types GET, POST,
PUT and DELETE.
The CoAP communication links are 1:1 and UDP-based, so the delivery is
not guaranteed. CoAP is made to work in highly congested networks, where
nodes do not have a lot of intelligence and are not always working.

Data Distribution Service (DDS)


Similar to MQTT, DDS follows a publish-subscribe methodology, with the
main difference being that there are no brokers. It means that all publishers
(i.e., temperature sensors) and subscribers (i.e., mobile phones) are all
connected to the same network. This network is known as Global Data
Space (GDS) and it interconnects each node with all the other ones to avoid
bottlenecks. An example of the DDS GDS can be seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2. A DDS Global Data Space. Image used courtesy of the DDS Foundation
Furthermore, any node can leave or join the network, since they are
dynamically discovered.

WebSocket
Linked to the HTTP protocol, the WebSocket technology establishes a TCP
connection between a browser and a server, and then both of them
exchange information until the connection is closed. Figure 3 shows a high-
level comparison between HTTP and WebSocket.

Figure 3. Comparison between HTTP and WebSocket. Image used courtesy of Scaleway

Although this protocol can be seen as an improvement of the HTTP


connection, the WebSocket is still very overloaded and heavy for IoT
applications.
Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP)
In the beginning, AMQP was not initially created for IoT applications,
but for banking environments. AMQP accepts publish/subscribe
architectures, as well as request/response types. It is TCP-based, so delivery
is guaranteed, as well as acknowledgment, which makes this protocol
reliable, with the consequent overhead message reliability.
Compared to MQTT, AMQP offers two Quality of Service levels:

 At most once: the sender does not wait until having an


acknowledgment from the receiver to delete a message.
 At least once: for each message, the sender will receive an
acknowledgment from the receiver before deleting the message. In a
case where the acknowledgment is lost, the message is re-sent.
 Exactly once: the messages are sent only once. It requires special
coordination between the sender and the receiver.

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol


(XMPP)
It is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) and in the past, it was
known as Jabber. It is an open-source, decentralized, secure protocol to
exchange XML messages.
A characteristic factor of XMPP is its addressing method and how nodes are
identified. It uses a Jabber ID with the format [email protected], which
allows two nodes to interchange information regardless of the distance
between them.

OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA)


It is a standard made for industrial communication, strongly oriented to
guarantee interoperability between manufacturers, operating systems, and
programming languages. The OPC foundation reported that many
industrial vendors are currently (as of 2022) adopting the OPC UA as the
open standard.

All in all, the OPC UA is a transport-agnostic protocol, so it supports both of


the previously used architectures: request/response (such as WebSocket or
HTTP), as well as the publish/subscribe (such as the MQTT).

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