A comparison of current web protocols for usage in cloud based automation systems

Web protocols are critical factor in successful implementation of web based industrial applications. Nevertheless, the main issue that significantly affects the real-time performance of such application is Web latency. Traditional web communication technologies, such as HTTP1.1, provide a uni-directional link and a request/response message exchange model. This solution is not feasible in web based applications involving large number of different interconnected devices, such as Industrial Internet of things. In this paper, we focus on bi-directional web protocols WebSocket, WebRTC and HTTP/2.0. We compare the performance parameters like latency, reliability, and security of these three protocols. At the end of this paper, we will present some suggestions how to optimize the usage of web protocols in industrial process automation applications.