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TCP in the Internet of Things: from ostracism to prominence

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Carles Gomez, CG 
Arcia Moret, AE 
Crowcroft, JC 

Abstract

TCP has traditionally been neglected as a transport-layer protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, recent trends and industry needs are favouring TCP presence in IoT environments. In this paper, we first motivate and describe the main IoT scenarios where TCP will be used. We then analyze the historically claimed issues of TCP in the IoT context. We argue that, in contrast to generally accepted wisdom, most of those possible issues fall in one of the following categories: i) are also found in well accepted IoT end-to-end reliability mechanisms, ii) can be solved, or iii) are not actual issues. Considering the future prominent role of TCP in the IoT, we provide recommendations for lightweight TCP implementation and suitable operation in such scenarios, based on our IETF standardization work on the topic.

Description

Keywords

TCP, Internet of Things, evaluation, HTTP, CoAP, MQTT, AMQP

Journal Title

IEEE Internet Computing

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1089-7801
1941-0131

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K031724/2)
Carles Gomez has been funded in part by the Spanish Government and by the ERDF through the Jose Castillejo grant CAS15/00336, and through project TEC2016-79988-P. His contribution to this work has been carried out in part during his stay as a visiting scholar at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Andrés Arcia- Moret has been funded by the project Network as a Service (EP/K031724/2).