Feasibility of an android messaging system using MQTT protocol

Question

Is such a system feasible?

Can we implement features like: (all)

1. User Access Control.
2. Encryption of messages transferred.
3. Predefined Topics.
4. Message Logging(in a Database)
5. Support up to 1000 users in the system.

Please help me out!

Answer 1

Let's look at these in relation to MQTT

• User Access Control - handled by the broker, via a username/password on the CONNECT call. Implementations vary. IBM's commercial WMQ product provides a pluggable mechanism for auth, not sure about open source ones. If you want to encrypt the wire using SSL you could do so, again the commercial IBM implementation supports that, I don't believe the free options do.
• Encryption of messages - needs to be done in the app, MQTT doesn't care what the payload is. There's some discussion of this online .
• Predefined Topics - you define the topics your app uses and decide how to use them! there's no need to "predefine" anything from an administrative perspective.
• Message Logging - simple to do via a backend script to subscribe to topics and push into a DB.
• Support up to 1000 users - depends on the implementation, but yes. Again the commercial IBM implementation supports tens of thousands of concurrent connections, the free RSMB is limited to (I think) ~1100 connections... of course that's a count of connections rather than users.

I hope that helps. There's a good MQTT community at mqtt.org and mailing list available via mqtt.org/get-involved. There's a good news post discussing places where MQTT is being used on Android , too.

Answer 2

Feasible? Sure. None of the features you mentioned will really be in Android though, they'll be in your backend.