Impact of the Application Layer Protocol on Energy Consumption, 4G Utilization and Performance

The IoT communication over our data highways is growing tremendously. In future many device and machine manufacturers will transmit data from customer end-devices to data centers to improve and change the products to the customer's needs. The focus of the next decades will be on reducing energy consumption and data overhead in order to keep utilization of 4G/5G networks low. This paper analyzes two different communication approaches often used in IoT scenarios. The benchmark compares the protocol MQTT against the RESTful approach which is based on HTTP(s) in terms of energy consumption and performance. The results of this paper highlight that MQTT has strong advantages compared to REST. This is also due to the fact that these application layer protocols were specialized for IoT communication while HTTP was extended to address new requirements.