A Reliable Publish–Subscribe Mechanism for Internet of Things-Enabled Smart Greenhouses

Abstract

Messaging protocols for the Internet of Things (IoT) play a crucial role in facilitating efficient product creation and waste reduction, and in enhancing agricultural process efficiency within the realm of smart greenhouses. Publish–subscribe (pub-sub) systems improve communication between IoT devices and cloud platforms. Nevertheless, IoT technology is required to effectively handle a considerable volume of subscriptions or topic adjustments from several clients concurrently. In addition, subscription throughput is an essential factor of the pub-sub mechanism, as it directly influences the speed at which messages may be sent to subscribers. The primary focus of this paper pertains to a performance assessment of the proposed message categorization architecture for the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) broker. This architecture aims to establish a standardized approach to pub-sub topics and generate new topics with various performance characteristics. We also standardize the form of MQTT protocol broker topic categorization and payload based on greenhouse specifications. The establishment of topic classification enhances the operational effectiveness of the broker, reduces data volume, and concurrently augments the number of messages and events transmitted from the greenhouse environment to the central server on a per-second basis. Our proposed architecture is validated across multiple MQTT brokers, including Mosquitto, ActiveMQ, Bevywise, and EMQ X, showing enhanced flexibility, extensibility, and simplicity while maintaining full compatibility with greenhouse environments. Key findings demonstrate significant improvements in performance metrics. The message processing time for the proposed Active MQ broker was increased approximately five-fold across all QoS levels compared to the original. Subscription throughput for the Bevywise MQTT Route 2.0 broker at QoS0 reached 1453.053, compared to 290.610 for the original broker. The number of messages in the Active MQ broker at QoS0 surged from 394.79 to 1973.95. These improvements demonstrate the architecture’s potential for broader IoT applications in pub-sub systems.