Currently the transport used by zabbix to get/send metric data from the agents is based on it's own protocol.

They are exist different protocols (MQTT, ØMQ, RabbitMQ, AMQP, IronMQ, StormMQ, raet)

If zabbix use one of them, it will be solve some feature requests (encryption of communications, performance, etc).

IMHO the interests protocols are ØMQ[1] (currently used by saltstack), MQTT[2] and reat[3]. For MQTT there are also exist an feature request(ZBXNEXT-2308).

[1]http://zeromq.org/
[2]http://mqtt.org/
[3]https://github.com/saltstack/raet