An Adaptive Multi-Protocol IoT Gateway for Resilient Edge-Cloud Communication: An ns-3-Based Evaluation

Abstract

In the last years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a key part of today’s digital infrastructure. From industrial automation to smart home devices, IoT systems connect physical sensors to cloud analytics and change how we interact with our environment. As these systems become larger and more complex, there is a growing need for communication methods that can manage unpredictable network errors, hardware limits, and frequent failures. Right now, MQTT and CoAP are the main protocols for IoT-to-cloud communication. But most systems use a fixed protocol, which makes it hard to adapt when problems like network traffic congestion or backend outages happen. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive edge gateway for ZigBee-based IoT networks that can switch between MQTT and CoAP as needed. The gateway monitors real-time performance, such as latency, packet loss, and backend availability, and chooses the best protocol and mode automatically. We tested our approach with in-depth simulations in ns-3, covering 180 scenarios including different types of failures, like link problems and broker outages. Our results show that adaptive switching improves packet delivery by 15–20% during faults in comparison to static setups and reduces recovery time without much extra overhead. This suggests that adapting protocols at the gateway is an effective way to make IoT systems more reliable.