Comparative Analysis of Power Consumption between MQTT and HTTP Protocols in an IoT Platform Designed and Implemented for Remote Real-Time Monitoring of Long-Term Cold Chain Transport Operations

IoT platforms for the transportation industry are portable with limited battery life and need real-time and long-term monitoring operations. Since MQTT and HTTP are widely used as the main communication protocols in the IoT, it is imperative to analyze their power consumption to provide quantitative results that help maximize battery life in IoT transportation systems. Although is well known that MQTT consumes less power than HTTP, a comparative analysis of their power consumption with long-time tests and different conditions has not yet been conducted. In this sense, a design and validation of an electronic cost-efficient platform system for remote real-time monitoring is proposed using a NodeMCU module, in which experimentation is carried out for HTTP and MQTT with different QoS levels to make a comparison and demonstrate the differences in power consumption. Furthermore, we characterize the behavior of the batteries in the systems and compare the theoretical analysis with real long-time test results. The experimentation using the MQTT protocol with QoS 0 and 1 was successful, resulting in power savings of 6.03% and 8.33%, respectively, compared with HTTP, demonstrating many more hours in the duration of the batteries, which could be very useful in technological solutions for the transport industry.