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European Conference on Software Architecture

ECSA 2020: Software Architecture pp 352–368Cite as

A Comparison of MQTT Brokers for Distributed IoT Edge Computing

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNPSE,volume 12292)

Abstract

Many enterprise IoT application scenarios, such as connected cars, smart cities, and cloud-connected industrial plants require distributed MQTT brokers to achieve high scalability and availability. With a market of over 20 MQTT brokers, it is hard for software architects to make a good selection. Existing MQTT comparisons often include only non-distributed brokers, focus exclusively on performance, or are difficult to generalize. We compared three distributed MQTT brokers for performance, scalability, resilience, security, extensibility, and usability in an enterprise IoT scenario deployed to an edge gateway cluster. We found that EMQX provided the best performance (28K msg/s), while only HiveMQ showed no message loss in our test scenario. VerneMQ offers similar features as the other brokers but is fully available as open source. The paper includes decision guidance for software architects, listing six major decision points regarding MQTT brokers.

Keywords

  • IoT
  • MQTT
  • Distributed messaging
  • Edge computing
  • Virtualization
  • Software containers
  • Benchmarking
  • GQM
  • Performance

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MQTT_implementations.

  2. 2.

    https://www.emqx.io/.

  3. 3.

    https://kubeedge.io/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.hivemq.com/.

  5. 5.

    https://vernemq.com/.

  6. 6.

    https://www.starlingx.io/.

  7. 7.

    https://satori-com.github.io/mzbench/.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/vernemq/vmq_mzbench.

  9. 9.

    http://mqtt-explorer.com/.

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/IFS-HSR/ADMentor.

  11. 11.

    https://pi3g.com/2019/05/29/mqtt-topic-tree-design-best-practices-tips-examples/.

  12. 12.

    https://satori-com.github.io/mzbench/scenarios/tutorial/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ABB Corporate Research Center Germany, Ladenburg, Germany

    Heiko Koziolek, Sten Grüner & Julius Rückert

Authors
  1. Heiko Koziolek
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  2. Sten Grüner
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  3. Julius Rückert
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heiko Koziolek .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Koninklijke Philips N.V., Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Anton Jansen

  2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ivano Malavolta

  3. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Henry Muccini

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, PA, USA

    Ipek Ozkaya

  5. University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland, Rapperswil, Switzerland

    Prof. Dr. Olaf Zimmermann

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Koziolek, H., Grüner, S., Rückert, J. (2020). A Comparison of MQTT Brokers for Distributed IoT Edge Computing. In: Jansen, A., Malavolta, I., Muccini, H., Ozkaya, I., Zimmermann, O. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12292. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58923-3_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58923-3_23

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58923-3

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