Failed to create test step for publishing and receiving mqtt messages

Currently I am building a test step which publish and receives messages with. This test step is supposed to behave in this manner:

1) wait for messages;

2) if message received, check the message;

3) if message is not received until timeout, fail;

This seems to run OK when using the SoapUI interface. But in a maven invironment, using mvn test, it reported this error on setup:

[WsdlTestCase] Failed to create test step for [PublishMsg]
[WsdlTestCase] Failed to create test step for [ReceiveMsg]

Some of my observations:

1, There might be an issue in the maven environment where I used parameterized host and it should read the project property MQTT_HOST, and it should be used as the host to publish and subscribe to. According to the log output, this step is AFTER the error message of failing to create test step, I am not sure if this is because the test step creation process is trying to ping the mqtthost.

2, The test steps are OK to run when in the SoapUI interface, but when running in the maven environment, it outputs the error messages and are skipped.

Any reasons or tips for this behavior?