Trimming the Fat: Introducing QUIC Thin-Apps for the Internet of Things

QUIC, a general-purpose transport protocol, is receiving growing interest in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), as researchers have mapped various IoT applications over to QUIC transport. In this paper, we aim to show that since QUIC is so feature-rich on its own, uper-layer complexities of traditional protocols can be greatly reduced or even eliminated. A technology's simplicity and resource frugality are critical for IoT devices. To exemplify this, we have designed a publish-subscribe 'thin-app' for IoT, relying almost entirely on QUIC's specification. We achieved comparable functionality to MQTT, doing away with the need for much of its control messaging. Furthermore, experimentation with our solution against MQTTv5 shows significant reductions in signaling overhead while maintaining comparable CPU and memory utilization.