Evaluating WebSocket and WebRTC in the Context of a Mobile Internet of Things Gateway

Abstract: This thesis project explores two well-known real-time web technologies: WebSocket and WebRTC. It explores the use of a mobile phone as a gateway to connect wireless devices with short range of radio links to the Internet in order to foster an Internet of Things (IoT). This thesis project aims to solve the problem of how to collect real-time data from an IoT device, using the Earl toolkit. With this thesis project an Earl device is able to send real-time data to Internet connected devices and to other Earl devices via a mobile phone acting as a gateway. This thesis project facilitates the use of Earl in design projects for IoT devices. IoT enables communication with many different kinds of “things” such as cars, fridges, refrigerators, light bulbs, etc. The benefits of IoT range from financial savings due to saving energy to monitoring the heart activity of a patient with heart problems. There are many approaches to connect devices in order to create an IoT. One of these approaches is to use a mobile phone as a gateway, i.e., to act as a router, between IoT and the Internet. The WebSocket protocol provides efficient communication sessions between web servers and clients by reducing communication overhead. The WebRTC project aims to provide standards for real-time communications technology. WebRTC is important because it is the first real-time communications standard which is being built into browsers. This thesis evaluates the benefits which these two protocols offer when using a mobile phone as a gateway between an IoT and Internet. This thesis project implemented several test beds, collected data concerning the scalability of the protocols and the latency of traffic passing through the gateway, and presents a numerical analysis of the measurement results. Moreover, an LED module was built as a peripheral for an Earl device. The conclusion of the thesis is that WebSocket and WebRTC can be utilized to connect IoT devices to Internet.