Web Protocols and Challenges of Web Latency in the Web of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been substantially dominated by proprietary and domain specific protocol stacks. There is no universal application protocol for the IoT that can work across many networking interfaces available today. The successful implementation of the IoT requires a single universal application layer protocol for devices and applications to talk to each other, regardless of how they are physically connected. One of the simplest and apparent solutions is to reuse mechanism, which is already extensively used for building scalable and interactive applications, such as the World Wide Web (Web) itself. Therefore, the adoption of the Web ecosystem and infrastructure to build applications for the IoT, leads to the concept of the Web of Things (WoT) and extends the IoT with the amalgamation of the Web as an open IoT ecosystem based upon open standards. While the IoT has been focusing on lower layers and hardware infrastructure, the WoT relies exclusively on application level protocols and tools. Web protocols are a critical factor in the successful implementation of the WoT. However, one of the main issues is web latency that may significantly affect the real-time performance of IoT systems. Therefore, this paper conducts a number of practical investigations on the performance and web latency of application layer protocols: HTTP/1.1, SPDY and HTTP/2. Using experimental results, it analyses the challenges of web protocols for the implementation of WoT.