Load Testing Tools for IoT platforms over MQTT

While IoT platforms can be tested using traditional load testing tools if standard protocols such as HTTP are used, there are a suite of other tools that can be used if you need to test the MQTT throughput capacity of your IoT platforms.

Jotting down a list of tools that can be used to test the MQTT broker of IoT platforms.

• MQTT-Malaria 
• JMeter - MQTT Plugin
• MQTT-LoadTest
• Gatling-MQTT Plugin
• MQTT Bench

Ruminating on MQTT

MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol over TCP/IP that supports the publish-subscribe paradigm. It is most suited for low bandwidth / high latency and unreliable networks and hence is a natural fit for field IoT devices.  A good MQTT primer is available here.

MQTT was the de-facto protocol for all our IoT applications, but of late we have started experimenting with MQTT even for mobile apps, after we learned that Facebook Messenger app uses MQTT :)

MQTT sessions can survive across TCP connection re-connects and thus is very useful in unreliable network conditions. Also in MQTT, you can specify the QoS level - e.g.

• Fire and forget (QoS 0)
• At least once (QoS 1)
• Exactly once (QoS 2)

It is very important to check if the MQTT broker we choose supports the required QoS levels. 

MQTT supports a hierarchy of topics, so you can subscribe to a top level topic and get all the messages to the subscriber. 

Most of the popular open source message brokers such as ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ and HiveMQ already support MQTT. A good comparison of the various MQTT brokers is available here - https://github.com/mqtt/mqtt.github.io/wiki/server-support

A performance benchmark of MQTT brokers is available here - http://www.scalagent.com/IMG/pdf/Benchmark_MQTT_servers-v1-1.pdf