Hierarchical MQTT with Edge Computation

Abstract

Lightweight Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) gains its popularity in many Inter of things implementations. However, MQTT is efficient at the cost of weak security support. Moreover, under large connection requests, MQTT brokers would become the bottlenecks and degrade the whole system performance. In this paper, we propose the first Hierarchical MQTT framework with Edge Computation (HMQTTEC). In this framework, brokers are organized in a hierarchical relation, according to their geographical properties or application requirements. The brokers arranged in lower layers handle the data sharing in their domains, perform edge computations (like summation, averaging, etc) on domain data, and report the processed data to their parental brokers. We implement a prototype system for the PM2.5 pollution monitoring application to access the performance of the design. The results and the analysis show the effectiveness and the efficiency of our design.