Performance Analysis of MQTT Protocol in IoT Environments: Impact of Payload Size and QoS on Key Metrics
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technology represents the transformative opportunity and already overcomes this limiting factor, utilizing lightweight communication protocols to minimize overhead compared to traditional internet systems. MQTT is one of the popular and efficient protocol used in IoT to exchange data. In this work, we investigate the MQTT behavior in given IoT scenarios by considering payload sizes (5 MB, 10 MB,15 MB, and 20 MB) and QoS levels as influencing factors for performance metrics such as throughput, execution time, traffic overhead, and latency. Testbed experiments on a Raspberry Pi 3 indicate that processing time scales with payload size and QoS-2 (highest reliability) introduces overhead up to an order-of-magnitude. For bigger payloads, throughput increases with QoS-0 (lowest reliability) delivering the highest throughput rates, while latency increases with both payload size and QoS level. The results provide important insight on how to efficiently improve the reliability of MQTT, as it evidences the possible trade-offs between both categories.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
A. J. Hintaw, S. Manickam, S. Karuppayah, M. A. Aladaileh, M. F. Aboalmaaly, and S. U. A. Laghari, “A Robust Security Scheme Based on Enhanced Symmetric Algorithm for MQTT in the Internet of Things,” IEEE Access, vol. 11, no. March 2023, pp. 43019–43040, 2023, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3267718.
S. ul A. Laghari, W. Li, S. Manickam, P. Nanda, A. K. Al-Ani, and S. Karuppayah, “Securing MQTT Ecosystem: Exploring Vulnerabilities, Mitigations, and Future Trajectories,” IEEE Access, pp. 1–17, 2024, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3412030.
A. J. Hintaw, S. Manickam, S. Karuppayah, and M. F. Aboalmaaly, “A brief review on MQTT’s security issues within the internet of things (IoT),” Journal of Communications, vol. 14, no. 6. 2019. doi: 10.12720/jcm.14.6.463-469.
L. Nastase, “Security in the Internet of Things: A Survey on Application Layer Protocols,” Proc. - 2017 21st Int. Conf. Control Syst. Comput. CSCS 2017, pp. 659–666, 2017, doi: 10.1109/CSCS.2017.101.
D. R. C. Silva, G. M. B. Oliveira, I. Silva, P. Ferrari, and E. Sisinni, “Latency evaluation for MQTT and WebSocket Protocols: An Industry 4.0 perspective,” in Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications, 2018, vol. 2018-June. doi: 10.1109/ISCC.2018.8538692.
V. Seoane, C. Garcia-Rubio, F. Almenares, and C. Campo, “Performance evaluation of CoAP and MQTT with security support for IoT environments,” Comput. Networks, vol. 197, p. 108338, Oct. 2021, doi: 10.1016/J.COMNET.2021.108338.
H. Tschofenig and T. Fossati, “Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Profiles for the Internet of Things,” IETF, 2016.
M. Iglesias-Urkia, A. Orive, M. Barcelo, A. Moran, J. Bilbao, and A. Urbieta, “Towards a lightweight protocol for Industry 4.0: An implementation based benchmark,” 2017. doi: 10.1109/ECMSM.2017.7945894.
D. Thangavel, X. Ma, A. Valera, H.-X. Tan, and C. K.-Y. Tan, “Performance evaluation of MQTT and CoAP via a common middleware,” in 2014 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP), Apr. 2014, pp. 1–6. doi: 10.1109/ISSNIP.2014.6827678.
S. S. Prayogo, Y. Mukhlis, and B. K. Yakti, “The Use and Performance of MQTT and CoAP as Internet of Things Application Protocol using NodeMCU ESP8266,” 2019. doi: 10.1109/ICIC47613.2019.8985850.
I. Hedi, I. Špeh, and A. Šarabok, “IoT network protocols comparison for the purpose of IoT constrained networks,” 2017. doi: 10.23919/MIPRO.2017.7973477.
Y. Guaman, G. Ninahualpa, G. Salazar, and T. Guarda, “Comparative Performance Analysis between MQTT and CoAP Protocols for IoT with Raspberry PI 3 in IEEE 802.11 Environments,” in Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies, CISTI, 2020, vol. 2020-June. doi: 10.23919/CISTI49556.2020.9140905.
D. H. Mun, M. Le Dinh, and Y. W. Kwon, “An Assessment of Internet of Things Protocols for Resource-Constrained Applications,” in Proceedings - International Computer Software and Applications Conference, 2016, vol. 1. doi: 10.1109/COMPSAC.2016.51.
D. Borsatti, W. Cerroni, F. Tonini, and C. Raffaelli, “From IoT to cloud: Applications and performance of the MQTT protocol,” in International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks, 2020, vol. 2020-July. doi: 10.1109/ICTON51198.2020.9203167.
E. Baranauskas, J. Toldinas, and B. Lozinskis, “Evaluation of the impact on energy consumption of MQTT protocol over TLS,” in CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2019, vol. 2470.
A. Oak and R. D. Daruwala, “Assessment of Message Queue Telemetry and Transport (MQTT) protocol with Symmetric Encryption,” 2018. doi: 10.1109/ICSCCC.2018.8703314.
C. Thomas Oliveira, R. Moreira, F. De Oliveira Silva, R. Sanches Miani, and P. Frosi Rosa, “Improving security on IoT applications based on the FIWARE platform,” in Proceedings - International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, AINA, 2018, vol. 2018-May. doi: 10.1109/AINA.2018.00104.
A. J. Hintaw, S. Manickam, M. F. Aboalmaaly, and S. Karuppayah, “MQTT Vulnerabilities, Attack Vectors and Solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT),” IETE J. Res., vol. 69, no. 6, pp. 3368–3397, Aug. 2023, doi: 10.1080/03772063.2021.1912651.
G. Kim, S. Kang, J. Park, and K. Chung, “An MQTT-Based Context-Aware Autonomous System in oneM2M Architecture,” IEEE Internet Things J., vol. 6, no. 5, 2019, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2919971.
Z. Liu, T. Liang, J. Lyu, and D. Lang, “A security-enhanced scheme for MQTT protocol based on domestic cryptographic algorithm,” Comput. Commun., vol. 221, pp. 1–9, May 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.comcom.2024.04.013.
A. J. Hintaw, “Secure Hybrid Scheme For Securing Mqtt Protocol Based On Enhanced Symmetric Algorithm,” Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2023.
C. Patel and N. Doshi, “‘a Novel MQTT Security framework in Generic IoT Model,’” in Procedia Computer Science, 2020, vol. 171. doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2020.04.150.
O. Standard, “MQTT version 3.1. 1,” 2014.
P. Client, “Eclipse Paho Client,” 2015.
“Eclipse Mosquitto Broker,” 2019.