Meet MQTT, The Industrial Protocol That Takes Your Data To The Cloud

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a mechanism for moving data around the factory floor or from the manufacturing environment to cloud applications. MQTT is designed to meet the challenge of publishing small pieces of data in volume to lots of client devices constrained by low-bandwidth, high-latency, or unreliable networks. Similar to Modbus TCP, MQTT uses a client/server relationship between devices.

MQTT supports dynamic communication environments where large volumes of data and events need to be made available to tens of thousands of servers and other clients.

What is MQTT?

The heart and soul of MQTT is the publish/subscribe architecture. This architecture allows a message to be published once and go to multiple clients, with complete message decoupling between the broker of the data/events and the clients(s) of the messages and events.

Topics are raw data points. Data is organized by topic in a hierarchy with as many levels of subtopics as needed. Clients can subscribe to a topic or a subtopic. They can also use wildcards to specify topics of interest.

Namespace designations are used to identify topics. Clients can only connect/communicate with a broker. A broker receives the information from the servers and matches the information to consumers by topic subscriptions. The information is distributed to every consumer that matched the topic. If no consumer requires the information, the information is discarded.

What are the benefits of MQTT?

Some of the benefits of MQTT technology include:

• Very efficient event handling protocol. MQTT is a “PUSH” system in which the producers push data to brokers. No bandwidth is consumed by clients requesting data.
• Low latency. Information is pushed immediately to clients.
• Low resources required by publishers. This makes it very good for low-resourced devices like sensors and actuators.
• Very reliable operation on fragile and unreliable networks. Brokers can be configured to retain messages for consumers that are temporarily disconnected.
• Provides separation between the producers of the data and the consumers of the data.
• It’s scalable and works well for both small and large numbers of devices.
• Allows you to move data from your factory floor to applications like Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Core and Microsoft Azure.

MQTT is a very simple way of distributing information from lots of publishers to lots of clients. It is extremely lightweight, reliable, and adapts well to low-resourced devices. Broker devices, which some view as a disadvantage, manage the connection between the publishers and clients. MQTT is a superior way of moving data from sensors and actuators to various kinds of clients.

Real Time Automation offers the MQTT protocol on our 460 gateway line and is compatible with most major industrial protocols including EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP, Modbus RTU, and BACnet.

If you’re looking for an easy way to move some of your factory floor data to your cloud application, like AWS IoT Core or Microsoft Azure, be sure to check out our website, call us at 800-249-1612, or email solutions@rtautomation.com.