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Performance Evaluation of CoAP Broker and
Access Gateway Implementation on Wireless
Sensor Network
Aldwin Akbar Hermanudin
Department of Electrical Engineering
Universitas Indonesia
Depok, Indonesia
aldwin.akbar@ui.ac.id
Fransiskus Astha Ekadiyanto
Department of Electrical Engineering
Universitas Indonesia
Depok, Indonesia
astha.ekadiyanto@ui.ac.id
Riri Fitri Sari
Department of Electrical Engineering
Universitas Indonesia
Depok, Indonesia
riri@ui.ac.id
Abstract—Currently there are several Application
Layer protocols running on Internet of Things system.
Protocols such as MQTT, CoAP, XMPP, and DDS have
different architectures and performance. Wireless
sensor networks operating in low power, low
bandwidth and with limited reliability, is more suitable
to use CoAP. However, CoAP is inferior to MQTT
architecture in terms of scalability. Therefore this
research focuses on CoAP Broker implementation of an
IETF draft which enables MQTT-like architecture to
be implemented in CoAP. This research aims to
implement an Access Gateway with the proposed
protocol and show its use-case in poultry farm,
involving sensor monitoring and actuator controls on
multiple location. The result of this research shows the
success of CoAP Broker implementation along with the
mentioned use-case and the performance evaluation
which has not indicate any congestion when handling
130 requests per second and good error-rate with low
value between 0.01% - 0.04%.
Keywords—MQTT, CoAP, CoAP Broker, Internet of
Things, wireless sensor network, sensor
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the use of Internet of Things has
grown rapidly, with the evidence of usage in industry,
housing, and security sector. This led to an increase in
the production of devices that utilize Internet of
Things architecture. According to Gartner, an analyst
company, by 2020 there will be 26 billion objects
connected to the Internet [1].
The development of Internet of Things, has been
supported by Wireless Sensor Networks technology.
Wireless Sensor Network itself is a network of
sensors connected to each other wirelessly. Wireless
sensor networks may consist of nodes that have
limited resources, limited processing capabilities, and
unreliable data transfer between nodes [2].
There are two commonly used protocols in an
Internet of Things system namely MQTT and CoAP.
Compare to CoAP, MQTT is good protocol in terms
of scalability, but poor on bandwidth usage. Whereas
CoAP has a good bandwidth usage but limited on its
scalability. MQTT with its publish-subscribe
architecture allows each node to perform many-to-
many communication through a certain topic of
interest. Whereas CoAP, that uses request-response
architecture, can only perform one-to-one
communication.
Therefore, to create a network with vast number
of sensor, a couple of strategy is available. One way
is to utilize current protocol and develop new feature
that can overcome its current limitations. Another
way is to design a good topology and infrastructure to
support scalability between sensor/actuator nodes.
This paper aims to do both by developing CoAP that
utilize publish-subscribe architecture defined in an
IETF draft on a wireless sensor network with the
usage of hierarchical topology. The result is obtain by
running experiments involving multiple sensor and
actuator simulating a poultry farm with multiple
location.
Even though, the process of data transfer in this
paper CoAP’s publish-subscribe architecture is based
on an existing library, a novel contributions that this
paper give is the use of hierarchical topology, the
development of MQTT to CoAP bridge, and the
implementation of CoAP’s publish-subscribe
architecture.
The organization of this paper is as follows:
Section II explains the MQTT and CoAP protocols.
Section III proposed a novel design of Access
Gateway with CoAP Broker. Section IV gives further
detail of the Access Gateway Design. Section V
defines the experiment setup and scenario. Evaluation
of the proposed Access Gateway and network
architecture is explained in Section VI. Section VII
gives the conclusion and future works.
II. APPLICATION LAYER PROTOCOL
A. Message Queue Telemetry Transport
Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is
a binary protocol that resides in the application layer.
MQTT is designed to be a lightweight protocol, has
small overhead and small code footprint [4].