Handling Mobility in IoT applications based on the MQTT protocol

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Connectivity clearly plays an important role in Internet of Things (loT) solutions, and the efficient handling of mobility is crucial for the overall performance of loT applications. Currently, the most widely adopted protocols for loT and Machine to Machine (M2M) environments, namely MQTT, CoAP or LWM2M, are directly dependent on the TCP/IP protocol suite. This suite is highly reliable when using wired networks, but it is not the best solution in the presence of intermittent connections. In this work we provide a solution to improve MQTT with an emphasis on mobile scenarios. The advantage of the solution we propose is making the system more immune to changes in the point of attachment of mobile devices. This way we avoid loT service developers having to explicitly consider this issue. Moreover, our solution does not need extra support from the network through protocols like MobilelP or LISP. The obtained results show that our proposal, based on intermediate buffering, guarantees that there is no information loss during hand-off periods due to node mobility; furthermore, based on discrete event simulation results, we determine the maximum number of sources and the required amount of buffers for a mobile node. This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Proyectos I+D+I 2014, Spain, under Grant TEC2014-52690-R. Luzuriaga Quichimbo, JE.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Manzoni, P.; Perez, M.; Boronat, P. (2015). Handling Mobility in IoT applications based on the MQTT protocol. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ITechA.2015.7317403