A Lightweight Messaging Protocol for Internet of Things Devices

Abstract

The move towards intelligent systems has led to the evolution of IoT. This technological leap has over the past few years introduced significant improvements to various aspects of the human environment, such as health, commerce, transport, etc. IoT is data-centric; hence, it is required that the underlying protocols are scalable and sufficient to support the vast D2D communication. Several application layer protocols are being used for M2M communication protocols such as CoAP, MQTT, etc. Even though these messaging protocols have been designed for M2M communication, they are still not optimal for communications where message size and overhead are of much concern. This research paper presents a Lightweight Messaging Protocol (LiMP), which is a minified version of CoAP. We present a detailed protocol stack of the proposed messaging protocol and also perform a benchmark analysis of the protocol on some IoT devices. The proposed minified protocol achieves minimal overhead (a header size of 2 bytes) and has faster point-to-point communication from the benchmark analysis; for communication over LAN, the LiMP-TCP outperformed the CoAP-TCP by an average of 21% whereas that of LiMP-UDP was over 37%. For a device to remote server communication, LiMP outperformed CoAP by an average of 15%.