Experimental Evaluation of Wildcard Subscription Impact on MQTT Broker Performance, Stability, and Security Under Authenticated High-Load IoT Conditions

Abstract

MQTT is widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) systems because of its lightweight publish–subscribe architecture and efficient support for resource-constrained devices. Although wildcard subscriptions simplify topic management, their impact on broker performance, stability, and security under authenticated high-load conditions has not been comprehensively investigated. Existing studies typically evaluate routing performance, security mechanisms, or broker scalability independently, leaving a limited understanding of their combined effects. This paper presents a systematic experimental evaluation of wildcard subscription behavior in an authenticated MQTT v5 environment. A controlled testbed employing TLS-based authentication and role-based access control was used to compare exact-topic subscriptions with single-level (+) and multi-level (#) wildcard subscriptions under progressively increasing workloads. Performance was evaluated using end-to-end latency, CPU utilization, throughput, delivery success rate, broker stability, and authorization exposure. The experimental results demonstrate that increasing wildcard-subscription complexity significantly increases routing overhead, resulting in higher latency and CPU utilization while reducing throughput and broker service capacity. Multi-level wildcard subscriptions consistently exhibited the greatest performance degradation and reached broker saturation at lower workload levels than exact-topic subscriptions, demonstrating that wildcard density compresses the broker’s operational stability region. The experiments also show that broad wildcard-based access control policies increase the risk of authorization leakage when improperly configured. These findings demonstrate that wildcard-subscription complexity is a critical determinant of MQTT scalability, broker stability, and security, and provide practical guidance for designing efficient and secure IoT messaging infrastructures.