@raina-iot/rlp

Raina Link Protocol (RLP) is a small binary protocol for direct, persistent TCP/TLS connections between IoT devices and an application server. It has no broker, topics, or pub/sub layer.

RLP is deliberately narrower than MQTT: it is for a device that authenticates once and exchanges numeric-channel telemetry and commands with the server that owns its connection.

Install and use

import { createRlpServer } from '@raina-iot/rlp';
const server = createRlpServer({ port: 9000, authenticate: hello => ({ accept: checkToken(hello) }) });
server.on('data', event => console.log(event.deviceId, event.sample));
await server.listen();
await server.command('sensor-7', { channel: 4, valueType: ValueType.BOOL, value: true });

Codec functions (encodeFrame, encodePacket, FrameDecoder, decodePacket) are standalone and usable by test tools and alternate transports. See the v1 specification.

Security: use TLS where required, authenticate every HELLO, select conservative frame/queue limits, and provide an application-level idle policy. RLP is v1 / pre-1.0 and its wire format should be treated as stable only after a 1.0 release.

Measured capacity (development environment)

On a macOS arm64 machine (8 logical CPUs, 16 GiB RAM) with Node v24.18.0 and plain TCP localhost, RLP was validated with 10,000 concurrent authenticated devices for 10 minutes. Each sent one FLOAT32 DATA frame every five seconds using normal jitter; the server observed approximately 1,995 DATA frames/s, zero unexpected disconnects, zero protocol/client errors, zero backpressure events, server event-loop p99 of 1.99 ms, and final RSS of 90.8 MiB. This is a measured lower bound for that machine/topology, not a production capacity or maximum. At 25,000 requested devices, localhost generator networking exhausted ports/timeouts before server saturation was observed. See docs/rlp-load-test-results.md in the source repository.