Authors:
Snowlin Preethi Janani,J. Immanuel JohnRaja,P. Getzi Jeba Leelipushpam,DOI NO:
https://doi.org/10.26782/jmcms.2026.05.00003Keywords:
Hierarchical broker federation,Message Queuing Telemetry Transport,Trust management,Attribute-Based Access Control,IoT,Broker trust evaluation,,Access control policies,Message routing,Distributed systems security.,Abstract
The rapid proliferation of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) systems has imposed stringent requirements on Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) infrastructures for scalability, security, and trust management. This research proposes a Hierarchical Trust-Oriented Broker Federation (HTBF) framework with fine-grained security enforcement to enable secure and elastic MQTT architectures across distributed edge–cloud environments. The proposed architecture organizes MQTT brokers into a three-tier hierarchy (edge, regional, and core layers), where inter-broker communication is governed by a dynamic trust evaluation model based on behavioral reliability, authentication success rate, and traffic anomaly scores. A lightweight trust computation function based on a discounted Bayesian state-space model enables real-time trust adaptation with negligible computational overhead (<2.1 ms per update). Fine-grained security policies are enforced using Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) combined with topic-level authorization, enabling per-client, per-topic, and per-payload security decisions. Experimental evaluation was conducted on a federated testbed comprising 30 brokers and 10,000 concurrent MQTT clients, deployed across edge and cloud nodes. Results demonstrate that the proposed HTBF model achieves a 43.7% reduction in unauthorized message propagation, a 31.2% improvement in broker resilience under coordinated attack scenarios, and a 27.5% decrease in average message latency compared to flat broker federation. Under high-load conditions (100,000 messages/s), the system maintained a throughput of 92,400 messages/s, with an average end-to-end latency of 18.6 ms and packet loss below 0.8%. Additionally, trust-based routing reduced malicious broker participation by 48.3%, significantly improving overall system reliability.Refference:
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