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

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.