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Evaluation of MQTT Bridge Architectures in a Cross-Organizational Context

Keila Lima, Tosin Daniel Oyetoyan, Rogardt Heldal, Wilhelm Hasselbring

TL;DR

The paper addresses evaluating MQTT bridge architectures in cross-organizational IoT contexts to understand latency and reliability trade-offs. It employs a benchmark methodology on a real IoT data platform prototype with gateway-edge to cloud data flow, comparing two deployment options (AUT1 and AUT2) under varying QoS levels, topic name sizes, and payload magnitudes. Key contributions include empirical insights into how bridge topology and payload characteristics interact to shape end-to-end delay and message loss, plus practical guidance favoring QoS1 for reliability and recommending fewer bridge processors to minimize latency. The work offers actionable guidance for practitioners designing cross-organizational MQTT bridges and identifies directions for future research on gateway deployment, payload scale, network locality, and energy efficiency.

Abstract

The latest surveys estimate an increasing number of connected Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices (around 16 billion) despite the sector's shortage of manufacturers. All these devices deployed into the wild will collect data to guide decision-making that can be made automatically by other systems, humans, or hybrid approaches. In this work, we conduct an initial investigation of benchmark configuration options for IoT Platforms that process data ingested by such devices in real-time using the MQTT protocol. We identified metrics and related MQTT configurable parameters in the system's component deployment for an MQTT bridge architecture. For this purpose, we benchmark a real-world IoT platform's operational data flow design to monitor the surrounding environment remotely. We consider the MQTT broker solution and the system's real-time ingestion and bridge processing portion of the platform to be the system under test. In the benchmark, we investigate two architectural deployment options for the bridge component to gain insights into the latency and reliability of MQTT bridge deployments in which data is provided in a cross-organizational context. Our results indicate that the number of bridge components, MQTT packet sizes, and the topic name can impact the quality attributes in IoT architectures using MQTT protocol.

Evaluation of MQTT Bridge Architectures in a Cross-Organizational Context

TL;DR

The paper addresses evaluating MQTT bridge architectures in cross-organizational IoT contexts to understand latency and reliability trade-offs. It employs a benchmark methodology on a real IoT data platform prototype with gateway-edge to cloud data flow, comparing two deployment options (AUT1 and AUT2) under varying QoS levels, topic name sizes, and payload magnitudes. Key contributions include empirical insights into how bridge topology and payload characteristics interact to shape end-to-end delay and message loss, plus practical guidance favoring QoS1 for reliability and recommending fewer bridge processors to minimize latency. The work offers actionable guidance for practitioners designing cross-organizational MQTT bridges and identifies directions for future research on gateway deployment, payload scale, network locality, and energy efficiency.

Abstract

The latest surveys estimate an increasing number of connected Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices (around 16 billion) despite the sector's shortage of manufacturers. All these devices deployed into the wild will collect data to guide decision-making that can be made automatically by other systems, humans, or hybrid approaches. In this work, we conduct an initial investigation of benchmark configuration options for IoT Platforms that process data ingested by such devices in real-time using the MQTT protocol. We identified metrics and related MQTT configurable parameters in the system's component deployment for an MQTT bridge architecture. For this purpose, we benchmark a real-world IoT platform's operational data flow design to monitor the surrounding environment remotely. We consider the MQTT broker solution and the system's real-time ingestion and bridge processing portion of the platform to be the system under test. In the benchmark, we investigate two architectural deployment options for the bridge component to gain insights into the latency and reliability of MQTT bridge deployments in which data is provided in a cross-organizational context. Our results indicate that the number of bridge components, MQTT packet sizes, and the topic name can impact the quality attributes in IoT architectures using MQTT protocol.
Paper Structure (14 sections, 9 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 14 sections, 9 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. MQTT in IoT Architectures
  3. MQTT Bridge
  4. Security in MQTT
  5. Methodology
  6. Research Questions
  7. Benchmark Setup
  8. Benchmark Parameters
  9. Load Configuration
  10. Trust Boundaries
  11. Results and Discussion
  12. Threats to Validity
  13. Related Work
  14. Conclusion and Future Work

Figures (9)

  • Figure 1: MQTT example communication patterns.
  • Figure 2: Benchmark setup components in the overall data delivery flow architecture.
  • Figure 3: Architectural Options Under Test (AUT).
  • Figure 4: Latency results for Gateway 1 of Provider 1 load with 125 KB payload (see Figure \ref{['fig:aut']}).
  • Figure 5: Latency results for Gateway 2 of Provider 1 load with 35 KB payload (see Figure \ref{['fig:aut']}).
  • ...and 4 more figures