An Assessment of the Performance of the Secure Remote Update Protocol in Simulated Real-World Conditions

This paper assesses the relative performance of the MQTT protocol in comparison to the Secure Remote Update Protocol (SRUP) in a number of simulated real-world conditions, and describes an experiment that has been conducted to measure the processing delay associated with the use of the more secure protocol. Experimental measurements for power consumption of the devices and the size of comparable TCP packets were also made. Analysis shows that the use of the SRUP protocol added an additional processing delay of between 42.92 ms and 51.60 ms—depending on the specific hardware in use. There was also shown to be a 55.47% increase in power consumption when running the secure SRUP protocol, compared with an MQTT implementation.