The Impact of Networking Protocols on Massive M2M Communication in the Industrial IoT

Abstract

Common use cases in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deploy massive amounts of sensors and actuators that communicate with each other or to a remote cloud. While they form too large and too volatile networks to run on ultra-reliable, time-synchronized low-latency channels, participants still require reliability and latency guaranties. We elaborate this for safety-critical use cases. This paper focuses on the effects of networking protocols for industrial communication services. It analyzes and compares the traditional Message Queuing Telemetry Transport for Sensor Networks (MQTT-SN) with the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) as a current IETF recommendation, and also with emerging Information-centric Networking (ICN) approaches, which are ready for deployment. Our findings indicate a rather diverse picture with a large dependence on deployment: Publish-subscribe protocols are more versatile, whereas ICN protocols are more robust in multi-hop environments. MQTT-SN competitively claims resources on congested links, while CoAP politely coexists on the price of its performance.