A Study of Publish/Subscribe Middleware Under Different IoT Traffic Conditions

Zhuangwei Kang, Robert Canady, Abhishek Dubey, Aniruddha Gokhale, Shashank Shekhar, Matous Sedlacek

Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Middleware and Applications for the Internet of Things, M4IoT@Middleware 2020

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Why This Matters

IoT applications have diverse and demanding requirements for data dissemination, but middleware platforms are often selected based on general reputation rather than systematic evaluation for specific use cases. Understanding how different middleware platforms perform under realistic IoT traffic conditions is essential for making effective technology choices. This work is innovative because it provides systematic, quantitative comparison of middleware platforms under realistic IoT scenarios, enabling practitioners to make informed decisions about technology selection.

What We Did

This paper presents a study of publish/subscribe middleware platforms including DDS, MQTT, and ZeroMQ under various IoT traffic conditions. The work defines QoS properties relevant to IoT applications and systematically evaluates middleware performance across three representative use cases including high-frequency data flows, periodic data flows, and sporadic data flows. The analysis provides practical guidance on middleware selection for different IoT applications.

Key Results

The evaluation shows that different middleware platforms excel under different traffic conditions, with DDS providing the most stable performance for most scenarios but higher latency than alternatives. Results demonstrate that middleware selection should consider specific QoS requirements and traffic patterns rather than assuming universal platform superiority. The work provides practical guidance for IoT system designers on matching middleware platforms to application requirements.

Full Abstract

Cite This Paper

@inproceedings{m4iot2020,
  author = {Kang, Zhuangwei and Canady, Robert and Dubey, Abhishek and Gokhale, Aniruddha and Shekhar, Shashank and Sedlacek, Matous},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Middleware and Applications for the Internet of Things, M4IoT@Middleware},
  title = {A Study of Publish/Subscribe Middleware Under Different IoT Traffic Conditions},
  year = {2020},
  abstract = {Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) semantics are critical forIoT applications due to their loosely coupled nature.Although OMG DDS, MQTT, and ZeroMQ are mature pub/sub solutions used for IoT, prior studies show that their performance varies significantly under differentload conditions and QoS configurations, which makes middleware selection and configuration decisions hard. Moreover, the load conditions and role of QoS settings inprior comparison studies are not comprehensive and well-documented. To address these limitations, we (1) propose a set of performance-related properties for pub/sub middleware and investigate their support in DDS, MQTT,and ZeroMQ; (2) perform systematic experiments under three representative, lab-based real-world IoT use cases; and (3) improve DDS performance by applying three of our proposed QoS properties. Empirical results show that DDS has the most thorough QoS support, and more reliable performance in most scenarios. In addition, its Multicast, TurboMode, and AutoThrottle QoS policies can effectively improve DDS performance in terms of throughput and latency},
  contribution = {minor},
  tag = {platform},
  keywords = {publish/subscribe middleware, IoT, quality of service, distributed systems, MQTT, DDS, ZeroMQ}
}
Quick Info
Year 2020
Keywords
publish/subscribe middleware IoT quality of service distributed systems MQTT DDS ZeroMQ
Research Areas
middleware CPS
Search Tags

Study, Publish/Subscribe, Middleware, Different, Traffic, Conditions, publish/subscribe middleware, IoT, quality of service, distributed systems, MQTT, DDS, ZeroMQ, middleware, CPS, 2020, Kang, Canady, Dubey, Gokhale, Shekhar, Sedlacek