Analyzing the Latency of QUIC over an IoT Gateway

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of an Internet of Things (IoT) cryptographic gateway which sits in-between attached IoT devices and the cloud. The gateway communicates with the cloud using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol over a Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 connection employing up-to-date asymmetric cryptography at a high security level. On the other side, the gateway allows the IoT devices to connect to the network employing MQTT over the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol, whereby QUIC has been recently standardized by the IETF.First, we measure the latency of MQTT over QUIC and TCP/TLS without the gateway, once with a Full-Handshake (FH) mode and another time with a Zero-Round Trip Time (0-RTT) mode. Then, we compare the time taken by QUIC with TCP/TLS, in case of a FH with both and in case of a 0-RTT after the first FH connection in QUIC, when using the gateway.This paper shows that MQTT over QUIC reduces the latency of the connection compared to MQTT over TCP/TLS in almost all cases considerably. Since on transport layer the gateway is fully transparent, the (logical) TLS 1.3 connection in QUIC between the IoT devices and the gateway saves time on the IoT devices without compromising security.