Things and Protocols in IoT
Courtesy:IoT by Arshdeep Bhaga
Block diagram of IoT Device
Contd…
IoT device consists of Interfaces
• I/O interfaces for sensors and actuators
• Internet Connection
• Memory and storage
• Audio/video
Contd…
• IoT device gather data from sensors and
distribute to cloud based servers or other
devices.
• IoT devices connected with actuators to
interact with the physical objects.
• IoT devices may be of type
Wearable sensors, Smart watches, In-Vehicle
sensors and sensors in industries.
OSI Reference Model
IoT Protocols
Link Layer
Physical layer or medium
IEEE 802.3(i/j/ae) – coaxial cable, Copper-
twisted pair, fiber optic and fiber (10Mb/s
– 40Gb/s).
IEEE 802.11(a/b/g/n/ac/ad) – WLAN
(5Ghz,2.4Ghz,2.4Ghz – 5Ghz,5Ghz,60Ghz)
with 1Mb/s – 6.75 Gb/s.
IEEE 802.16 – Wireless broadband
standards with 1.5Mb/s – 1Gb/s. 802.16m
with 100Mb/s(mobile station) and
1Gb/s(fixed stations).
Contd…
IEEE 802.15.4 – Low Rate Wireless Personal
Area Network, high level communication
protocol with 40Kb/s – 250Kb/s. Low cost and
Low speed, power constrained.
2G/3G/4G – Mobile communication,
GSM&CDMA, UMTS&CDMA2000, 4G-LTE with
9.6Kb/s - 100Mb/s.
Network generations
Network Layer(Internet Layer)
• IP datagrams from source network to
destination network
• Host addressing and Packet routing
• Datagram with source and destination
addresses – route across multiple networks
• Hierarchical IP addressing Schemes
- IPv4, IPv6 and 6LoWPAN
Contd…
IPv4 – IP for identifying devices on a network ,
do not guarantee packet delivery (handled by
TCP) with 32 bit address scheme.
IPv6 – 128 bit address scheme
6LoWPAN – IPv6 over Low power WPAN for
low-powered devices in 2.4Ghz frequency
range with 250Kb/s and works with 802.15.4
link layer protocol.
Transport Layer
• End-End message with or without handshake
approach(TCP/UDP).
• Functions - error control, segmentation, flow
and congestion control
TCP
₋ Web browsers with HTTP and HTTPS , email
programs with SMTP and File transfer with FTP.
₋ Connection-oriented, stateful protocol
₋ Send packets, ensure reliable transmission
₋ Error detection and retransmission of lost packets
₋ Flow control and congestion control
Contd…
UDP
₋ Transaction oriented, stateless protocol
₋ require initial setup procedure
₋ Small data units exchange
₋ No guaranteed packet delivery
₋ No ordering of messages
₋ No duplicate elimination
Application Layer
• Interface with lower layer protocol – data over
the network
• Data encoded – application layer protocol and
encapsulated – transport layer protocol
• Transaction oriented communication
• Port numbers – application addressing to
provide process-process connections.
HTTP
HTTP – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol(WWW)
Commands -> GET, PUT, POST,DELETE, HEAD,
TRACE, OPTIONS
Stateless Protocol with request – response
model
HTTP client - Browser or application on IoT
device or mobile app
Uses URI - HTTP resources
Request and status lines
Methods
Status codes
Contd…
Pros and Cons
Pros
Platform Independent
Not connection oriented hence Less Overhead
Stateless protocol
Less resources is required since the connections are closed
once the data transfer is completed
Cons
No reliable exchange of data
Too complicated and too much overhead even for less
payload
Only point to point Communication
CoAP
CoAP – Constrained Application Protocol
Web transfer protocol with request-response
model
M2M applications - constrained devices and
network
Client-server architecture , interface with
HTTP and supports same commands of HTTP
Contd…
• Runs on top of UDP instead of TCP
• Uses client server architecture where client
communicate with servers using
connectionless datagrams
• Supports methods such as
• GET, PUT, POST and DELETE
Contd…
WebSocket
WebSocket – Full-duplex communication
protocol – single socket connection
TCP based - messages between client and
server
Allows stream of messages to be sent back
and forth between client and server
The client can be a
Browser
Mobile Applications
IoT device
MQTT
MQTT – Message Queue Telemetry Transport
Light weight messaging protocol - publish-
subscribe model
Client – server architecture
IoT device(Client) connects MQTT
broker(Server)
Constrained environments with limited
processing and memory resources, low
network bandwidth.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Less Overhead
Multiple QoS types for Reliable exchange of data
Provides secured communication with SSL Mutual
authentication
Requires Less bandwidth
Cons
Connection oriented
– The MQTT brokers requires more resources than the HTTP servers
XMPP
XMPP – Extensible Messaging and Presence
Model
Decentralized protocol with client-server and
server-server
Real time communication with XML data
between IoT devices(small units)
Applications - Messaging , presence
syndication, gaming, voice-video calls and chat
DDS
DDS – Data Distribution Service
Data centric middleware with device-device
Publish-subscribe model gather & distribute
data - receive generated data
Publisher is an object responsible for data distribution (
Generation) - Creates topic
Subscriber responsible for receiving published data -
Subscribes to topic
Provides QoS control with configurable
reliability
AMQP
AMQP – Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
Open application protocol for business messaging
Point-point, publish-subscribe model, routing and
queuing
Receive messages and route them connections
Publish messages – exchange – distribute messages
to queues
Messages delivered – consumers -> pull messages
from queues
