Real time and secure messaging service for IoT applications using MQTT

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system or framework of things or objects that have internet connectivity as well as that are interrelated and are capable to collect and exchange information without human intervention over a wireless network. Most of the IoT applications such as medical applications require real time and secure exchange of information among connected devices. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a communication protocol used for real time communication between networks with limited bandwidth as it is significantly lightweight. Even though security of using MQTT is still a matter of concern for using it in IoT network, MQTT is still prime choice for IoT communication protocol as there is no alternative has yet been developed. Authors of this article have reviewed numerous published researches on secure MQTT protocol for IoT network and discover some alarming security loop holes of MQTT communication protocol on IoT application network that need to be addressed. The prime aim of this work is to propose a secure and real time MQTT protocol for IoT application without compromising any loss of data. The research has been implemented in Raspberry Pi 3B system using Python 3.4.10 development platform along with Numpy 1.11.1 and scipy 0.18.0 (for mathematical analysis), paho-mqtt 1.5.0 (for MQTT publication/subscription), and Chromium (for displaying research result). The output of this research shows that the proposed MQTT protocol has tighten security during exchanging information over IoT network without any loss of data.