A Comparative study of COAP and MQTT communication protocols

Internet of things (IOT) technology consists of nonstop data emitter small devices, sensor nodes and gateways. Structured and unstructured data delivered mainly through internet connection, cause heterogeneous and enormous data transmission. The IOT ecosystem is a composition of heterogeneous smart objects like actuators; sensors having the main purpose of insuring the interconnectivity of all its components that functions in our daily industrial and educational life, as well as our daily security. In addition toIOT devices allowing the monitoring of humans, they also are interacting together like mobile devices, health monitor gadgets, heart beat integrated sensors, fitness bands, Patient Workup and surgical Medical Equipment. This myriad of devices highlights the challenge of how to accomplish all these goals with the tiny capabilities, since all of them are equipped with light resources with affordability limitations, in addition to little power sources availability (devices that might need to function for years with being recharged). Scalability is main purpose for an efficient IOT ecosystem. At devices level this efficiency could be accomplished mainly through three essential factors: energy, resources and network usage to support the large amount of bandwidth transmitted by the overall systems devices. Here appears the important role of communication protocol stack that main ruin these tiny devices resources while transmitting large bandwidth data, insuring data delivery, uncontrollable latency or scattered inefficient iterating processes. In this paper, we have designed and implemented two client applications: first based on Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and the second on Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) in order to monitor and compare the impact of these two communications over IOT eco system functionality, alongside energy consumption, resources usage on devices, latency and data bandwidth produces over network.