Client-Transparent and Self-Managed MQTT Broker Federation at the Application Layer

The use of IoT devices for monitoring and automation became very disseminated. Also, and as a consequence, IoT scalability issues evolved into one of the main challenges on large deployments. One of the most adopted architectures for the communication between IoT devices and other information systems is based on the Publish/Subscribe paradigm, mainly embraced by MQTT-capable devices. Some implementations aimed to solve scalability challenges on those environments, mainly using clustering solutions, while a few considered federation approaches. Existing solutions are predominantly proprietary, lacking public documentation, and may be considered incipient. In the present work, we propose a client-transparent and self-managed solution for scaling MQTT brokers using federation approach through a python-written wrapper, providing federation functionalities and message routing without customization of regular brokers. While clustering solutions usually target throughput improvement, the federation approach explores higher availability through distributed architecture. We present a validation to expose our solution’s flexible availability and its capability to deal with topology change issues.