Selecting the Device Connection Protocol¶

EnOS provides several connection solutions for developers to connect device data to the EnOS platform. The first step to determine which solution to use is to check whether the device to connect meets the following two conditions.

Supports TCP/UDP communication.
Supports the data format of the EnOS device connection protocol through firmware upgrade.

If the device meets both conditions, the device can be directly connected to the EnOS IoT Hub.

If the device does not meet either of the conditions and is connected to another system or cloud platform, you can connect it to EnOS through message integration. See Message Integration for more information.

Direct Connection to EnOS¶

Devices can connect to EnOS through the following protocols.

MQTT
CoAP
HTTP

Protocols Comparison¶

Function	MQTT	CoAP	HTTP
Static authentication	Supported	Supported	Supported
Dynamic authentication	Supported	Supported	Not supported
Certificate based bi-directional authentication	Supported	/	Only certificate based unidirectional authentication is supported (platform authenticated devices)
Reporting of the tags, attributes, measurement points, and events of devices	Supported	Supported	Supported
Passing data through	Supported	Supported	/
File-type data reporting	Not supported	Not supported	Supported
Batch reporting of measurement points and offline measurement points	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Measurement point setting and service invocation	Supported	Supported	Not supported
Receiving passed-through data	Supported	Supported	Not supported
Device registration, sub-device upper & lower thresholds, and device lifecycle management	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Firmware OTA update	Supported	Not supported	Not supported

The three protocols provide the following schemes in terms of data security.

MQTT: Optional certificate-based Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol transfer
CoAP: Optional Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol transfer based on pre-shared key (PSK)
HTTP: Optional certificate-based TLS protocol transfer

Connection Protocol Flow Chart¶

You can use the following flow chart to determine which protocol your device should use to connect to EnOS.

Note

Devices that are already connected to a third-party cloud can forward their data to EnOS cloud through the EnOS message integration function.