According to the vision of the Internet of Things the seamless and flexible networking of everyday objects will become an important field of application for Internet-based communication. The simple integration of these devices into a communication system often requires wireless technologies, especially when there is no wired infrastructure available. Cellular networks of the third and fourth generation are promising enablers for embedding a variety of different devices into the Internet of Things. However, cellular networks use a completely different approach for data transmission and media access than wired networks like Ethernet. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the transmission behavior of common protocols for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication with respect to the peculiarities of cellular networks. In this paper, three M2M protocols – CoAP, MQTT and OPC UA – are compared to each other with regard to their transport mechanisms to evaluate the transmission times and analyzing potentials for optimization. For the evaluation a laboratory test environment with cellular network emulators for EDGE, UMTS and LTE is used to analyze the protocols without interference of delays caused by the Internet or by other users allocating resources of the cellular network

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