Container-based MQTT Broker Cluster for Edge Computing

This paper presents the implementation of an edge-based MQTT broker cluster, by using a lightweight container orchestration framework and a cluster of single board computers. The main goal is to deliver a low-cost, scalable and lightweight messaging solution to support communication between IoT devices in remote areas, where computational resources and network connectivity are limited. An intermediate layer of cluster server is developed to complement and support the collective processing of distributed MQTT brokers. This paper also presents the evaluations of the MQTT broker cluster in terms of message throughput, end-to-end latency and runtime performance of the system. The broker cluster is able to maintain an average latency of less than 10 milliseconds, and a worst-case latency bound of 52 milliseconds, showing that the microservice-based implementation is feasible for many latency demanding applications in the IoT edge-cloud environment.