Communication protocols for mid-range mobile IoT devices : And their applicability to a publicly shared bikes platform

Abstract: Internet of Things, or the infrastructure of the information age society, is an expanding area of research. It is the idea that physical things that we have today, can be turned into devices by being connected to a network. The purpose of these devices is through more sensors and actuators, allow smarter and more robust infrastructure to be built, as well as improving consumer devices interoperability. This thesis will investigate the current state of the art application layer communication protocols that have been developed with resource constrained mobile devices in mind. It will look specifically at high latency mid-range wireless cellular communication by investigating how the protocols affect energy consumption for an embedded Internet of Things device. This is done with the constraint that these findings needs to be applicable to the fifth generation of cellular networks, as well as extensions to current generation standards. The application layer communication protocols Constrained Applications Protocol(CoAP), Message Queue Telemetry Transport(MQTT) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol(HTTP) used on multiple modem modules, are investigated in a quantitative approach in deductive survey experiments, testing a variety of what is concluded to be typical sensor and actuator scenarios. The goal with the survey, is to ultimately select the protocol that shows to be the most suitable for a project to build a prototype platform for embedded mobile devices in the shape of publicly shared bikes in a city. This prototype is described and its architecture and design decisions are presented and argued for. The survey discovers that CoAP is the most suitable protocol for the purpose of the thesis, and proceeds to show how it is applied to the described platform.