
Which transmission protocol is more efficient? UDP or MQTT
Frequently Asked Questions
UDP and MQTT in general cannot be compared with each other as they operate on different layers in the OSI Model for network transport.
UDP stands for User datagram protocol and is a transport layer protocol in the OSI model. It is a connection less protocol and is generally more efficient.
The main disadvantage with UDP is that it is a connectionless protocol and it is the responsibility of the designer to implement mechanisms to make sure data has reached successfully.
MQTT stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport and is an application layer protocol. It is one layer above the transport layer that we discussed earlier. It relies on TCP which is the connection based counterpart for UDP which adds the connection handshake overhead and MQTT has additional mechanisms to enable a publish-subscribe model of communication.
MQTT is a much more robust and feature rich mode of communication compared to UDP but for IoT applications where battery life and data efficiencies are of utmost importance, UDP takes the advantage.
On average, the battery life of an Ellenex Level sensor using MQTT is 30% less compared to its UDP counterpart communicating directly with Ellenex platform.
For a more detailed comparision, please go through our blog post