Should I use MQTT or HTTP

Question

Hi...
I'm actually working on a device that senses and collects data such as temperature, humidity, etc.

It's got a solar charged battery. 

Most of the time it's in a deep sleep state and wakes up only when it needs to sense and transfer data. This operation takes about 1-2 minutes, and then it goes back to sleep.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I think MQTT should be a good option if the device needs to be accessible to receive messages from a topic all the time, but in my case, it only read sensors and sent data to a server periodically.

Currently I'm sending the data through HTTP, but I'm wondering if it makes sense to implement MQTT? 

Answer 1

After testing MQTT vs HTTP(REST) over SSL from a normal server and a Raspberry Pi board, we inferred that the results depend on use-case and device where the process is running. This is true, both from a performance point of view and energy consumption.

In your case, we have a special test as well => delivering many messages (multiple probes) via HTTP, HTTP-batch or MQTT. I've come to the conclusion that:

• If you have the possibility to send data in one HTTP request - it will be the best option. 
• MQTT is on the second place.
• HTTP with per-message delivery is much less power efficient and slower then MQTT.