A New Approach to a Self-Organizing Federation of MQTT Brokers
- 1 Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Fronteira Sul, Brazil
Abstract
In the Publish/Subscribe (PS) communication paradigm clients producing content (i.e., publishers) send it to a broker, which relays the content to consumers (i.e., subscribers). Communication can happen asynchronously, leaving all the hurdles to the server/broker. MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is the most used P/S protocol in designing IoT applications. The usual MQTT scenario comprises a single broker, making it a potential bottleneck and a single point of failure. Clustering of brokers is the typical approach for scaling MQTT, usually restricting deployment to a single administrative domain. The federation of autonomous brokers is a more flexible approach for scaling the MQTT protocol, with just one representative self-organizing protocol at the moment. We present a new variant for such protocol, providing a well-structured mechanism for building and orchestrating the federation of brokers. The main contribution of this study is to offer a feasible solution for deploying the MQTT federation without requiring critical changes to regular clients. By following the topic naming conventions, clients are unaware they rely on a federation of brokers. To provide a glimpse of our solution in action, a case study demonstrates that the protocol can easily provide flexible reliability with low complexity.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/jcssp.2022.687.694
Copyright: © 2022 Nicolas Kolling Ribas and Marco Aurélio Spohn. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- 2,318 Views
- 1,333 Downloads
- 2 Citations
Download
Keywords
- Publish/Subscribe Communication
- Federation of P/S Brokers
- MQTT