Introduction:
Approaching the IoT world, one can be wondered on how many protocols we can use to communicate IoT devices.
There are many protocols such as AMQP, CoAP, MQTT and the omnipresence HTTP.
Trying to stay in the practical world, we can shortly compare two of them: MQTT and HTTP
MQTT protocol is designed as a machine-to-machine (M2M) & IoT connectivity protocol.
MQTT stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport.
This protocol is thus light-weight that it is often supported by some of the littlest measure and monitoring devices, and it can transmit information over way reaching sometimes intermittent networks. simple MQTT protocol architecture (broker based) for more read here
Related: Introducing MQTT for beginners- Connectivity protocol for M2M and IoT
HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol; most of us know about this, HTTP connection between client (web user) and the web server.
It is the common used protocol for the Internet, can be the most used for IoT devices that need to publish a lot of data. It uses normal IP header for routing of packets and data are not encrypted before transmission.
Details on HTTP visit here
Comparison between MQTT and HTTP protocols
| Features | MQTT | HTTP |
|---|---|---|
| Full form | Message Queue Telemetry Transport | Hyper Text Transfer Protocol |
| Architecture | It has publish/subscribe architecture. Here devices can publish any topics and can also subscribe for any topics for any updates. | It has request/response means Client/Server architecture. |
| Upper layer protocol | It runs over TCP. | It runs over TCP and UDP. |
| message size | small, . | Large, |
| Message format | binary with 2Byte header | ASCII format. |
| Data distribution | 1 to 0/1/N | one to one only , more POST |
| Data security | Yes, It uses SSL/TLS for security | NO, hence HTTPS is used to provide data security |
| Complexity | Simple | Client more complex (ASCII parser) |
| Encryption | It encrypts payload i.e. it is payload agnostic | data are not encrypted before transmission |
| When to use | if your project is to let the fridge to communicate with the thermometer to adapt the engine pump, you can use the MQTT easily | if you need to collect big data from around the world, then you can think to use HTTP |
See also: MQTT and CoAP: IoT Developers dilemma
Conclusion:
MQTT Protocol is easy of use. If your project is to let the fridge to communicate with the thermometer to adapt the engine pump, you can use the MQTT easily, if you need to collect Big data i.e large amount of data from around the world, then you should think to use the HTTP protocol.
HTTP is worthy and extendable. But MQTT is more suitable when it is referred to as IoT development.
See also: IoT Weather Station Using Node-Red as MQTT Broker
Let us know what you think about MQTT and HTTP and their difference in the comment section below.
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