A study of application layer protocols within the Internet of Things

Abstract: The Internet of Things market grows at an extreme rate each passing year. Devices will gather more data, which puts a lot of pressure on the communication between the devices and the cloud. The protocols used needs to be fast, secure, reliable and send any type of content. This thesis work conducts a research of the three most popular application level protocols ; MQTT, HTTP and AMQP, to examine which is best suited in an Internet of Things environment. The project is made with Axians AB to provide insight regarding the protocols, so that the company can decide which protocol will be best suited for their projects. A theoretical study of the performance was made, followed by case studies on different aspects of the protocol. The case studies were made using a Dell gateway and a 4G connection to mimic a real world project. Scripts were developed to measure different performance attributes of the protocols. The analysis and discussion of the results proved that MQTT or AMQP is the best protocols, depending on the project.