In this thesis, the trade-offs between latency and transmitted data volume in vehicle-to-cloud communication for different choices of application layer messaging protocols and binary serialization formats are studied. This is done with the purpose of getting enough performance improvement to enable delay-sensitive Intelligent Transport System (ITS) features, and to reduce data usage in mobile networks. The studied protocols are Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and the serialization formats studied are Protobuf and Flatbuffers.  The results show that CoAP — the only User Datagram Protocol (UDP) based protocol — has the lowest latency and overhead while not being able to guarantee reliable transfer. The best performer that can guarantee reliable transfer is MQTT. For the serialization formats, Protobuf is shown to have three times smaller serialized message size than Flatbuffers and also faster serialization speed. Flatbuffers is the winner in the case of memory use and deserialization time, which could make up for the poor performance in other aspects of data processing in the cloud. Further, the implications of these results in ITS communication are discussed suggestions made into future research topics.