A Pure HTTP/3 Alternative to MQTT-over-QUIC in Resource-Constrained IoT

TL;DR

This paper proposes an HTTP/3-based publish-subscribe protocol for resource-constrained IoT, demonstrating significant RTT savings over MQTT-over-QUIC, with comparable network overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel HTTP/3 solution for IoT publish-subscribe systems, leveraging H3's advantages over H2 and comparing it to MQTT-over-QUIC.

Findings

H3 reduces publish message RTT by 1 round-trip time.

H3 offers timely dissemination suitable for high RTT IoT networks.

MQTT-over-QUIC has slightly lower network overhead.

Abstract

In this paper, we address the issue of scalable, interoperable, and timely dissemination of information in resource-constrained IoT. Scalability is addressed by adopting a publish-subscribe architecture. To address interoperable and timely dissemination, we propose an HTTP/3 (H3) solution that exploits the wide-ranging improvements made over H2. We evaluated our solution by comparing it to a state-of-the-art work: MQTT-over-QUIC. Because QUIC and H3 have undergone standardization in tandem, we hypothesized that H3 would take better advantage of QUIC transport than an MQTT mapping would. Performance, network overhead, and device overhead were investigated for both protocols. Our H3-based solution satisfied our timely dissemination requirement by offering a key performance savings of 1 RoundTrip Time (RTT) for publish messages to arrive at the broker. In IoT networks, with typically high RTT, this savings is significant. On the other hand, we found that MQTT-over-QUIC put marginally less strain over the network.