How much data consumed on MQTT connection - mqtt

I wonder how much data will be consumed (approximately) over say one month if I just connected to an MQTT server.(without sending or receiving any messages).
I need to calculate it to measure what data plan should I recharge for my sim card used in IoT application.
Thanks

Edit: fix broken link as suggested by #Jacob
I hope that you can find your answers here:
MQTT data usage
By the way... The client sets the keep alive value when it sends a CONNECT request to the server (aka the broker).
Potentially, if the client choose 0 as keep alive value, no data is consumed except for setup connection.

Last time I had to do something similar I simulated the traffic of a month.
Because computers are much faster than IoT devices, just use any kind of high-level library to send the traffic the IoT devices would be sent in a month and then measure the TCP traffic.

Related

How to know the time that packet takes to travel from client to server?

I am working on a project and I want to know the time between client and server that packet takes to reach it destination. I am using a raspberry pi as client and my laptop as server. The connection between the server and client will be socket connection. So, I want to send an image from client to the server and take the timestamps in both ending to know the time.
Sincerely
First, don't send an image to measure a single packet time. The image might require multiple packets to be sent and you'll end up measuring more than you wanted.
Second, using timestamp on both ends is not very reliable as it depends on the time synchronization between the systems which is hard to achieve and maintain.
Third, don't reinvent the wheel. If you want to measure communication lag, use PING. Its tried and tested, its efficient and its implemented for you so it's faster & cheaper to use and you don't risk adding bugs of your own.

why and when i need mqtt broker for IOT/M2M application

Just asking one silly question, hope someone can answer this.
I'm bit confused regarding MQTT broker. Basically, the confusion is, there are so many things being used for data storing, transfer and processing (like Flume, HDInsight, Spark etc). So, when and why I need to use one MQTT broker?
If I would like to use Windows 10 IoT application with HiveMQ, from where can I get the details? how to use it? How I get benefit out of this MQTT broker? Can I not send data from my IoT application directly using Azure or HDFS? So, how MQTT broker fits into it or helping me to achieve something?
I'm new to all these and tried to find some tutorials, however, I'm not getting anything proper. Please explain it in more details or give some tutorials for this?
MQTT is a client-server protocol for pub-sub based transport that has a comparatively small overhead, and thus applicable to mobile and IoT applications (unlike Flume, etc.). The MQTT broker is basically a server that handles messaging to/from MQTT clients and among them. The functionality pretty much stops at the transport layer, even though various MQTT add-ons exist.
If you are looking to implement a solution that would reliably transfer data from your IoT devices to the back-end system for processing, I would suggest you take a look into Kaa open-source IoT platform. It goes much further than MQTT by providing not only the transport layer, suitable for low-power IoT devices, but also a solid chunk of the application level logic (including the object bindings for your application-level data structures, temporary data persistence, etc.).
Here is a link to a webinar that explains how to build a scalable IoT analytics system with Kaa and Spark in less than an hour.
This is an architectural choice. IoT applications are possible without MQTT but there are some advantages when using MQTT. If you are completely new to MQTT, take a look at this in-depth MQTT series: http://forkbomb-blog.de/2015/all-you-need-to-know-about-mqtt
Basically the main architectural advantage is publish / subscribe designed for low-latency, high throughput (mobile) communication with minimal protocol overhead (which is important if bandwidth is at a premium). You can completely decouple consumers and producers.
HDFS is the (distributed) Hadoop file system and is the foundation for Map / Reduce processing. It is not comparable to a MQTT broker. The MQTT broker could write to the HDFS, though (in case of HiveMQ with a custom plugin).
Basically MQTT is a protocol while the products you are mentioning are, well, products which solve completely different problems:
Flume is basically used for log aggregation at scale. You won't use MQTT for that, at least there is not too much advantage because this is typically done in backend applications.
Spark and Hadoop shine at Big Data crunching. They are a framework and not a ready to use solution. They are not really comparable to MQTT. Often MQTT brokers like HiveMQ are used in conjunction with these, Spark / Hadoop for data processing and HiveMQ for communication.
I hope this helps you getting started. Best would be to read about typical use cases of all these technologies, this is a bit too broad for a single SO answer.
MQTT is a data transport, so the usual thing I have to compare it with is HTTP. HTTP has two important characteristics, a) It goes from one point to another, b) It is request/response, so only one end can start a data transfer. MQTT connects many end points to many end points, and either end can start a data transfer. So, if you have just one device and only one service or person that will ever access it, and only by polling, then HTTP is great. MQTT means many devices can post data to many services or people, AND the other way around. Your question assumes that your data is always going to land up in some sort of data store, but many interactions are about events and responding to them immediately, like ringing a doorbell, or lowering the landing gear. In these cases you will often want to both record the data, and have an immediate action occur, like your phone making a doorbell noise.
Finally, you send data to MQTT semantically, rather than by IP address.
This means that your services subscribes to /mikeshouse/doorbell rather than polling 192.168.22.4, which is a huge gain once you have a number of devices.

How do I increase the priority of a TCP packet in Delphi?

I have a server application that receives some special TCP packet from a client and needs to react to it as soon as possible by sending an high-level ACK to the client (the TCP ACK won't suite my needs).
However, this server is really network intensive and sometimes the packet will take too long to be sent (like 200ms in a local network, when a simple server application can send it in less than 1ms).
Is there a way to mark this packet with a high-priority tag or something like that in Delphi? Or maybe with the Win32 API?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT
Thanks for all the answers so far. I'll add some details. My product has the following setup: there are several devices that are built upon vehicles with WIFI conectivity. When they arrive at the garage, those device connect to my server and start to transmit data.
Because of hardware limitations, I implemented a high-level ACK to make the device aware that the last packet arrived successfully (please, don't argue about this - the data may be broken even if I got a correct TCP ACK). However, if I use my server software, that communicates with a remote database, to issue this ACK, I get very long delay (>200ms). If I use an exclusive software to do this task, I get small latencies (<1ms). So, I was imagining if I could just tell Windows to send those special packets first, as it seems to me that this package is getting delayed so the database ones can get delivered.
That's the motivation behind my question.
EDIT 2
As requested: this is legacy software and I'm using the legacy dclsockets140.bpl package and Delphi 2010 (14.0.3593.25826).
IMO it is very difficult to realize this. there are a lot of equipment and software involved. first of all, if you communicate between 2 different OS's you got a latency. second, soft and hard firewalls, antiviruses, everything is filtering/delaying your package.
you can try also to 'hack' the system(this involve some very good knowledge on how the frames/segments are packed/send,flow control,congestion,etc), either by altering it from code, either by using some tools like http://half-open.com/ or others.
In short, passing MSG_OOB flag to the send function marks the data as "urgent". Detailed discussion about the OOB in the context of Windows Sockets implementation specifics is available here.

Sending data to multiple sockets at exact same time

I'm want to design a ruby / rails solution to send out to several listening sockets on a local lan at the exact same time. I want the receiving servers to receive the message at exact same time / or millisecond second level.
What is the best strategy that I can use that will effectively allow the receiving socket to receive it at the exact same time. Naturally my requirements are extremely time sensitive.
I'm basing some of my research / design on the two following articles:
http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tech/Ruby/MulticastingInRuby.red
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/ruby_socket_programming.htm
Now currently I'm working on a TCP solution and not UDP because of it's guaranteed delivery. Also, was going to stand up ready connected connections to all outbound ports. Then iterate over each connection and send the minimal packet of data.
Recently, I'm looking at multicasting now and possibly reverting back to a UDP approach with a return a passive response, but ensure the message was sent back either via UDP / TCP.
Note - The new guy syndrome here with sockets.
Is it better to just use UDP and send a broad packet spam to the entire subnet without guaranteed immediate delivery?
Is this really a time sensitive component? If it's truly down to the microsecond level then you may want to ensure its implemented close to native functions on the hardware. That being said a TCP ACK should be faster than a UDP send and software response.

What is the best algorithm/technique to control client connections to the server?

I have over 50 clients connected to one server (low end server, running windows 2003 server), every time there is a power failure or switch failure the clients will disconnect from the server, the server might remain on during this incidents (if power backup is installed), when the clients came back they automatically detect the server and initiate a connection procedure, at this point the server will start dishing out the relevant data to the clients. Its at this point you realize some clients will start freezing becouse the server is not quick enough to dish out data and so it blocks the rest of the clients.
I have implemented a crude method to control this client storm but i was asking if guys out there have better algorithms to perform this kind of task.
NB: Am using Asta sockets components on a delphi application, but i dont mind examples from different fields,
Similar to network collision-detection protocols, perhaps clients could wait a random period of time before initiating their connection at startup?
In addition to the random startup delay suggested by Bremen, implement some sort of "too busy; try again later" message in your protocol. Rejecting a client with a short message should not be a problem for 50, 100, or even 1000 clients. Have the clients respond by doing a random delay and retrying + exponential backoff.
The solution depends on your preferences as well. Is it ok for you to drop down the connections request or send busy message?
Another option can be that you start sending data to the clients in sort of roundrobin manner. To this end you can have different threads responsible for sending data to different clients. Advantage of this case can be that none of the clients will be starved.

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