Performance of security options for message protocols: A comparative analysis

We explore the challenges around security configuration and performance while utilizing publish–subscribe protocols in the Internet of Things, edge computing, and fog computing. Issues in security configuration can lead to disruptions and higher operation costs. These issues can be prevented by selecting the appropriate transmission technology for each configuration, considering the variations in sizing, installation, sensor profile, distribution, security, networking, and locality. We introduce a comparative analysis of different configurations around a smart agriculture use case. For that, we implemented a simulation environment to generate datasets relevant to research and compare the results in terms of performance, resource utilization, security, and resilience—focused on authentication process. This analysis provides a blueprint to decision support for fog computing engineers on the best practices around security configurations.