Design Issues for Communication Protocols Conversion Scheme of IoT Devices

Abstract

Despite IoT technology provides an open and distributed networking environment, there is no compulsory standard of communication protocol for the description of object information. As a result, IoT devices with different communication protocols would require relevant converters to perform semantic analysis, or else communication between IoT devices may fail. Therefore, this paper proposes to design the conversion scheme for communication protocols of IoT devices (IoT-CPCS). This proposed scheme aims to integrate the formats of the data collected by different IoT devices, convert these data into useful and important information, present the converted information in readable message formats, and consequently store these messages in virtual servers built in the cloud platform. In addition, we conduct simulation experiments on IoT - CPCS and original MQTT transmission mechanism called MQTT Broker, and evaluate them with three key performance indicators (KPIs) such as average conversion time, system throughput, and average latency time. The simulation results indicate that the improving ratios for using the IoT - CPCS in average conversion time are 22.7%, 26.2%, 16.8%, 13.7%, 16.7% under 300, 500, 100, 2000, and 4000 packets respectively, and the system throughput is improved by 58.9% in average. Although IoT - CPCS in average latency time is a little poor than the MQTT Broker, but the latency ratio may not exceed 10%. The proposed IoT - CPCS scheme can improve the application compatibility of IoT for facilitating wider promotion, and raise the applicability level of IoT. In the future, we will consider another common communication protocols used in the IoT such as AMQP, and accuracy ratio of other KPI to evaluate the IoT - CPCS scheme with a larger amount of data.