Benchmarking Performance of Various MQTT Broker Implementations in a Compute Continuum

With the increasing adoption of IoT devices and applications, significant research and development efforts have been centered around engineering novel ecosystems referred to as the IoT-edge-cloud compute continuum. In this article, we implement, analyze and present a case study for performance benchmarking of five well known and select open source MQTT broker implementations in an open-source compute continuum testbed. The proposed MQTT broker implementations are evaluated in terms of response time, different payload sizes and throughput. Measurements and results show that the hardware platform used, the message size, as well as the network parameters (latency, packet loss and jitter) have a significant impact on the resulting performance of various broker implementations and therefore have to be carefully considered in the selection process for the building blocks of the continuum. All implementations and measurements are made to be fully reproducible and free and open source.