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

In this letter, we address the issue of scalable and timely dissemination of information in resource-constrained IoT networks. The scalability is addressed by adopting a publishsubscribe architecture. To address the timely dissemination, we propose an HTTP/3 (H3) publish-subscribe solution that exploits the wide-ranging improvements offered by H3. We evaluated our solution by comparing it to a state-of-the-art work which maps MQTT to QUIC. Because QUIC and H3 have been developed 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 implementations. 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.