A Comparative Efficiency of Broker for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate the efficiency of the broker for the Internet of Things. Network performance metrics will be used to benchmark the service capabilities of brokers, including Mosquitto, HiveMQ, Apollo, ActiveMQ, and RabbitMQ. The experiment set the environment to be the same by using the Raspberry Pi single-board computing running the Raspbian open source operating system, provided with the MQTT protocol. The experiment of this study was divided into two types: the efficiency measurement of brokers by single publisher and the efficiency measurement of brokers by multi publishers. The performance measurement in this study was DEA method, which determines input factors of the experiment evaluation, including the CPU usage, bandwidth usage, and transmission time. An output factor of the experiment is the number of messages that the broker receives from all the publishers. The research methodology consisted of the following steps: 1) study the theories and processes related to data communications of MQTT protocol, sensors and brokers; 2) design experiments and structures of network systems for install the client and the server program; 3) test the communication between the publisher computer and the broker computer; 4) compare the results of the experiment to find the efficiency of the brokers as designed; and 5) conclusion results and performance comparison of service brokers. The results of the research show that the Mosquittto broker had the most overall performance with the mean value of 1,000, followed by ActiveMQ with 0.716 and HiveMQ with 0.596, respectively.