Classification and evaluation of IoT brokers: A methodology

Since the term Internet of Things (IoT) was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999, a number of middleware platforms have been developed to cope with important challenges such as the integration of different technologies. In this context of heterogeneous technologies, IoT message brokers become critical elements for the proper function of smart systems and wireless sensor networks (WSN) infrastructures. There are several evaluations made on IoT messaging middleware performance. Nevertheless, most of them ignore crucial aspects of the IoT context that also need to be included, such as reliability and other qualitative aspects. Thus, in this article, we propose a methodology for classification and evaluation of IoT brokers to help the scientific community and technology industry on evaluating them according to their interests, without leaving out important aspects for the context of smart environments. Our methodology bases its qualitative evaluations on the ISO/IEC 25000 (SQuaRE) set of standards and its quantitative evaluations on Jain's process for performance evaluation. We developed a case study to illustrate our proposal with 12 different open‐source brokers, validating the feasibility of our methodological approach.