Use of QUIC for CoAP transport in IoT networks

Abstract

The QUIC protocol, formerly known as Quick UDP Internet Connection, has recently been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). While initially designed to support the transport of Hypertext Transfer Protocol version 3 (HTTP/3) messages, QUIC can also be employed for various applications. This paper explores the effective utilization of the QUIC protocol for transporting Internet of Things (IoT) messages. Specifically, we propose a proxy-based scheme that leverages the multi-streaming features of QUIC to deliver Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) messages. In the proposed scheme, multiple CoAP connections between IoT clients and a server are aggregated using client proxy and server proxy. Each CoAP connection is mapped onto a designated QUIC stream. It is noted that this proxy-based approach can be implemented without requiring modifications to existing CoAP applications at the client and server sides. Furthermore, we introduce a compressed mapping scheme from CoAP messages to QUIC streams to enhance performance within the proxy-based model. In testbed experimentation, the proposed QUIC-based CoAP transport scheme is compared with the existing UDP-based and TCP-based CoAP schemes in a variety of IoT network environment. From the experimentation results, we see that the proposed QUIC-based scheme can achieve 80% reduction in round-trip time and 9% increase in fast response rate, compared to the other candidate schemes. We can also see that the CoAP over QUIC scheme with compression provides a 10% performance gain over the case without compression.