MQTT: The standard for IoT Messaging

What is MQTT?

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a standard messaging protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport that is ideal for connecting remote devices with a small code footprint and minimal network bandwidth. MQTT today is used in a wide variety of industries, such as Smart Building, Automotive, Manufacturing, Telecommunications, Transport, oil, and gas, etc.

Why MQTT?

Lightweight & Efficient

• MQTT clients are very small, require minimal resources so can be used on small microcontrollers. MQTT message headers are small to optimize network bandwidth.

Bi-directional communications

• MQTT allows for messaging between the device to the cloud, and the cloud to the device. This makes for easy broadcasting messages to groups of things.

Scale to millions of things

• MQTT can scale to connect millions of IoT devices.

Reliable message delivery

• The reliability of message delivery is important for many IoT use cases. This is why MQTT has 3 defined quality of service levels: 0 - at most once, 1- at least once, 2 - exactly once.

Support for unreliable networks

• Many IoT devices connect over unreliable cellular networks. MQTT’s support for persistent sessions reduces the time to reconnect the client with the broker.

Security enabled

• MQTT makes it easy to encrypt messages using TLS and authenticate clients using modern authentication protocols, such as OAuth.

Does MQTT support security?

You can pass a username and password with an MQTT packet in V3.1 of the protocol. Encryption across the network can be handled with SSL, independently of the MQTT protocol itself (it is worth noting that SSL is not the lightest of protocols, and does add signifi cant network overhead). Additional security can be added by an application encrypting data that it sends and receives, but this is not something built-in to the protocol, in order to keep it simple and lightweight

MQTT Broker

A tab for setting the IP address of the so-called MQTT Broker has been added in the wired central units of the miniCU series and also in the upgraded gateway eLAN-RF-103. An MQTT Broker is a local or cloud-based software service that automatically collects and distributes short messages from or to devices that are subscribed by the user. Messages about the current status of the device or commands for the device are stored in a tree structure in the MQTT Broker.

We added MQTT Broker service into our device iNELS Bridge.