A Survey and Comparison of Publish/Subscribe Protocols for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

Publish/subscribe protocols have proven to be a very flexible, efficient, and scalable approach for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to the convergence of IoT and industry, and the evolving Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), these protocols face new challenges and increasing communication requirements. However, it is not known to what extent the protocols can fulfill these requirements. In this paper, we examined the most commonly used IoT protocols that are either based on publish/subscribe or define the use of it through standard extensions. Based on a literature review, we derived concrete requirements for the use in the industrial domain, compared the characteristics of the protocols, and evaluated them with regard to these requirements. Our results show that none of the examined protocols can completely fulfill all the requirements and therefore further modifications are necessary.