What Makes an Ideal Protocol for IIoT?
If you want to ship goods, you need infrastructure. Trucks, trains, ships, and planes rely on highways, tracks, ports, and airports. In a similar way, a key element of Industrial IoT (IIoT) is the infrastructure, in other words, a data protocol. Just as there are many transportation modes to choose from (some better than others), there are a number of IIoT protocols on offer―and they are not all the same.
Since the IIoT is still quite new, it has been an ongoing question as to what makes an ideal IIoT protocol. With limited experience in this new sphere, many early adopters have looked to existing protocols. For example, companies are currently using or considering MQTT or AMQP messaging protocols, the REST web services protocol, or the OPC UA industrial protocol. Each of these works fine in its own application space, and each seems like it could work as an IIoT protocol. But are any of these really suited to task? Or is there something better out there?
9 Criteria for an Ideal Protocol
To answer that question, we did a comparison. We distilled over 20 years of hands-on experience in industrial data protocols and TCP networking into 9 criteria for what makes an ideal protocol for IIoT. The results are summarized in a new white paper, IIoT Protocol Comparison.
These 9 criteria cover all of the essential areas of high-quality industrial data communication, like real-time performance and interoperability. They also cover the broader arena of the Internet, with its greater security risks, variations in bandwidths and latencies, and multi-node architectures. The white paper considers specific criteria for each of these in turn, and provides a simple explanation of how each of the protocols does or does not meet them.
If you’ve been following the growth and development of Skkynet over the years, the results of the comparison should come as no surprise. The only protocol we are aware of that was designed from the ground up to provide secure networking of industrial data both on-premise and over the Internet is DHTP. DHTP is what our products and services have been using for over 20 years, and it is one of the keys to their success. We invite you to read the white paper, consider the criteria, and see for yourself what makes an ideal protocol for IIoT.
