We study the performance of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT) over QUIC. QUIC has been recently proposed as a new transport protocol, and it is gaining relevance at a very fast pace, favored by the support of key players, such as Google. It overcomes some of the limitations of the more widespread alternative, TCP, especially regarding the overhead of connection establishment. However, its use for Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios is still under consideration. In this paper we integrate a GO-based implementation of the QUIC protocol with MQTT, and we compare the performance of this combination with that exhibited by the more traditional MQTT/TLS/TCP approach. We use Linux Containers and we emulate various wireless network technologies by means of the ns-3 simulator. The results of an extensive measurement campaign, show that QUIC protocol can indeed yield good performances for typical IoT use cases.

In this paper we analyze the performance of QUIC as a transport alternative for Internet of Things (IoT) services based on the Message Queuing Telemetry Protocol (MQTT). QUIC is a novel protocol promoted by Google, and was originally conceived to tackle the limitations of the traditional Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), specifically aiming at the reduction of the latency caused by connection establishment. QUIC use in IoT environments is not widespread, and it is therefore interesting to characterize its performance when in over such scenarios. We used an emulation-based platform, where we integrated QUIC and MQTT (using GO-based implementations) and compared their combined performance with the that exhibited by the traditional TCP/TLS approach. We used Linux containers as end devices, and the ns-3 simulator to emulate different network technologies, such as WiFi, cellular, and satellite, and varying conditions. The results evince that QUIC is indeed an appropriate protocol to guarantee robust, secure, and low latency communications over IoT scenarios.

We introduce rQUIC, an integration of the QUIC protocol, and a coding module. rQUIC has been designed to feature different coding/decoding schemes and is implemented in go language. We conducted an extensive measurement campaign to provide a thorough characterization of the proposed solution. We compared the performance of rQUIC with that of the original QUIC protocol for different underlying network conditions as well as different traffic patterns. Our results show that rQUIC not only yields a relevant performance gain (shorter delays), especially when network conditions worsen, but also ensures a more predictable behavior. For bulk transfer (long flows), the delay reduction almost reached 70% when the frame error rate was 5%, while under similar conditions, the gain for short flows (web navigation) was ≈ 55%. In the case of the video streaming the QoE gain (p1203 metric) was, approximately, 50%.