Formal models for the verification, performance evaluation, and comparison of IoT communication protocols

Abstract

Currently, the IoT performs important functions in several diverse applications. As a consequence of such diversity, there are also several issues to deal with, and the communication of devices is one of these prominent challenges. Due to its heterogeneity, the communication of IoT devices is an eminent system function, and, thus, distinct communication protocols have been proposed for these systems. Even under the same operating conditions, the performance of these protocols can differ significantly. In this paper, we present a performance evaluation of IoT communication protocols for the application layer. We address the problem of the efficiency of IoT protocols by means of a formal model-based approach, which encompasses features of various protocols and aims at analyzing and comparing the performance of these protocols. The proposed models have been proven useful by considering the verification and comparison of three well-known IoT communication protocols, namely MQTT, AMQP and CoAP protocols.