Even lower latency in IIoT: evaluation of QUIC in industrial IoT scenarios

In this paper we analyze the performance of QUIC as a transport alternative for Internet of Things (IoT) services based on the Message Queuing Telemetry Protocol (MQTT). QUIC is a novel protocol promoted by Google, and was originally conceived to tackle the limitations of the traditional Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), specifically aiming at the reduction of the latency caused by connection establishment. QUIC use in IoT environments is not widespread, and it is therefore interesting to characterize its performance when in over such scenarios. We used an emulation-based platform, where we integrated QUIC and MQTT (using GO-based implementations) and compared their combined performance with the that exhibited by the traditional TCP/TLS approach. We used Linux containers as end devices, and the ns-3 simulator to emulate different network technologies, such as WiFi, cellular, and satellite, and varying conditions. The results evince that QUIC is indeed an appropriate protocol to guarantee robust, secure, and low latency communications over IoT scenarios.The authors are grateful for the funding of the Industrial Doctorates Program from the University of Cantabria (Call 2020). This work has been partially supported by the Basque Government through the Elkartek program under the DIGITAL project (grant agreement number KK-2019/00095), and by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs (RTI2018-093475-AI00)