Author:
Marco Aurélio Spohn
Affiliation:
Federal University of Fronteira Sul, Chapecó, SC, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Publish/Subscribe, Broker Federation, MQTT, Internet of Things, Self Organizing Protocols.
Abstract:
Many applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) use the publish/subscribe (P/S) communication paradigm. Among the most representative protocols, there is MQTT. Its basic architecture relies on a single server/broker: publishers send data topics to the broker, and then it forwards the data to subscribers. Having a single server may make things easier for configuration and management; however, there is room for a potential bottleneck, besides being a single point of failure. Clustering servers usually address scalability in MQTT broker deployment; however, most solutions are proprietary. Meanwhile, autonomous brokers could be federated together to scale and increase availability. A self-organizing federation proposal already available in the literature implies substantial changes to brokers’ inner implementation; furthermore, there has not been any implementation yet. This work explores an endogenous federation approach: design a supporting agent (called federator) that realizes the
brokers’ federation based on the native P/S mechanism. There are no implied modifications to regular/standard brokers, but it requires changes to the client-side (i.e., publishers and subscribers). This work presents a primary architecture and an initial case study to grasp some fundamentals and benefits of adopting the proposed solution.
(More)