Study of latencies in ThingSpeak

Abstract

IoT platforms play an important role on modern measurement systems because they allow the ingestion and processing of huge amounts of data (big data). Given the increasing use of these platforms, it is important to characterize their performance and robustness in real application scenarios. The paper analyzes the ThingSpeak platform by measuring the latencies associated to data packets sent to cloud and replied back, and by checking the consistency of the returned data. Several experiments were done considering different ways to access the platform: REST API, MQTT API, and MQTT broker alone. For each experiment, the methodology is explained, results are presented, and conclusions are extracted. The REST and MQTT APIs have similar performances, with roundtrip times between 1 s and 3 s. The MQTT broker alone is more agile, with roundtrip times below 250 ms. In all cases, the up and down links are far from being symmetric, with the uplink delay showing higher variance than the downlink delay. The obtained results can serve as a reference for other IoT platforms and provide guidelines for application development.