Implementing A Middleware API for Facilitating Heterogeneous IoT Device Communication Protocols and Data Retrieval

Abstract

Currently, there are over 14 billion IoT devices [7], and with many devices come many protocols, the main ones being MQTT and CoAP. We are interested in connecting the many diverse IoT devices to the cloud. To do so, we use the middleware architecture proposed by article [8] in which a device, called the middleware, acts as the middleman between the various IoT networks and the cloud. Since IoT devices typically operate in real-time, performance is of great concern. Therefore, we conducted a simulation to measure the data latency of using middleware and the overall fairness between different IoT networks. Our simulation had an MQTT and a CoAP network interacting with the middleware. The simulation results showed that CoAP always had a lower travel time than MQTT, mainly because CoAP is a more lightweight protocol. However, we also found that MQTT had slightly more throughput, which was unexpected since we initially thought that CoAP would have had higher throughput. We have shown that analyzing data via a middleware device is possible and that there are potential directions to explore, such as evaluating different Quality of Service Algorithms in the context of having a middleware device.