Performance Evaluation of MQTT Brokers in the Internet of Things for Smart Cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become of great importance in the last decades. The term is used to denote the connectivity between electronic devices that allows the collect and sharing of data through the Internet. IoT technologies can be applied to automate and minimize problems related to urbanization in Smart City scenarios. In this context, MQTT brokers (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) are used to enable communication between IoT devices. Brokers are responsible for enabling connection and sending of messages between devices. The current literature presents a wide variety of brokers and to choose the suitable solution for the project, which can lead to performance problems, may become a hard task. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze the performance of MQTT brokers regarding latency in the data packets sending, and to present advantages and drawbacks of the solutions in Smart Cities scenarios. Results showed that the computer hardware features and the bandwidth used have a greater impact on the latency, showing that several factors can influence the performance of brokers.