Survey of Communication Protocols for Internet-of-Things and Related Challenges of Fog and Cloud Computing Integration

TL;DR

This survey reviews IoT communication protocols and their suitability for fog and cloud integration, analyzing their characteristics, interoperability, and performance issues to guide system design.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of IoT communication protocols and discusses their application in fog and cloud environments, highlighting interoperability challenges.

Findings

Request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols analyzed

Protocols' performance issues like latency and energy consumption reviewed

Guidelines for protocol selection in IoT-fog-cloud systems provided

Abstract

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This paper surveys on the application layer communication protocols to fulfil the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the paper first presents a comparative analysis of the main characteristics of IoT communication protocols, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the paper surveys the protocols that are widely adopted and implemented in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their interoperability and wider system integration. Finally, the paper reviews the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption and network throughput. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.