Evaluation of HTTP and MQTT Protocols in the Design of Telemetry Data for Embedded Systems on Smart Wheelchairs

Smart electric wheelchair is a standard wheelchair equipped with an embedded system and electric motor that can reduce the physical effort required by people with disabilities as a user to move the wheelchair. For the user riding profile analysis, data from the smart electric wheelchair are needed, such as handling data, speed, throttle, and battery level. To make real-time system monitoring, this research develops a telemetry system. This research aims to evaluate the architecture design that includes hardware, software, and communication protocol to provide the best performance for telemetry. HTTP and MQTT protocols are evaluated. Testing of HTTP and MQTT protocols is conducted based on latency, throughput, and packet loss percentage. Based on this research, it has been found that the HTTP protocol has a superior throughput compared to the MQTT protocol, but it has higher latency than the MQTT protocol. The packet loss percentage in the HTTP protocol tends to fluctuate more than the MQTT protocol. However, in this study, the HTTP protocol performs better than the MQTT protocol because the telemetry data generated from the embedded system in the smart wheelchair has relatively large packet sizes.