Baseline vs. Middleware Resilience: Socket and Broker Communication under Stress in IoT Edge Networks

Ensuring resilient communication in IoT Edge networks is critical for applications ranging from industrial automation to defense systems especially under stressed conditions. This study compares two widely used communication paradigms: socket based and broker based systems. We implemented a reproducible testbed using Mininet and Docker following which we introduced realistic network impairments such as packet loss, corruption, reordering and foreign packet injection. Both paradigms were tested with identical payloads, message rates and node topologies to provide a fair comparison. We evaluate performance in terms of end-toend latency, throughput, reliability and fault tolerance under these impairments. Our results show that socket communication performs well under normal conditions by offering low latency and high throughput but its performance drops sharply in the presence of induced impairments. Broker based systems have slightly higher baseline latency but remain stable under all tested impairments because of asynchronous message delivery, buffering and built-in fault tolerance. Testing confirms that broker based messaging delivers a higher proportion of messages under adverse conditions. This study clarifies the trade-offs to offer practical guidance for selecting communication paradigms in real-world IoT Edge deployments.