A scalable and low-cost MQTT broker clustering system

Abstract

This paper aims at building a scalable MQTT broker by combining low-cost board computers like Raspberry Pi and open source broker software. The MQTT broker can be used to exchange messages between devices and devices in term of publish/subscribe for create Internet of Things network. Nowadays people extremely interest in IoT not only in small room or home but expand to the big company which have a huge amount of IoT devices. Thus, we propose a scalable and low cost MQTT broker clustering which can implement easily but have high performance with a load balancer for a single entry point of MQTT messages and balance the message in clustering. We decide to use Raspberry Pi as it have low cost and can run linux OS with Docker and have enough spec for MQTT broker. This paper also shows the performance of the Raspberry Pi cluster and how to visualize the status of a computer cluster on SAGE2 wall.