What is MQTT ?

INTRODUCTION :
Everybody talks about the Internet of Things nowadays. Increasingly affordable micro
controllers like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are enabling cheap devices that measure
sensor data and send it over the internet. The goal of this post is to introduce the
lightweight protocol MQTT and its capabilities to send data between devices and other
systems and to demonstrate them by implementing two clients with Eclipse Paho.
The term Internet of Things was first used by Kevin Ashton in 2009 for interconnecting
physical devices over the internet. The basic idea is very simple: Physical devices can
exchange data between each other or being controlled by others. Examples of such
devices would be a refrigerator, a car, a building or basically any other electronic device.
One of the most common use cases is the collection, transmission, consolidation and
displaying of sensor data. The results could be a web dashboard with the aggregated
values or an alarm, when a threshold is exceeded.
The application scenarios are almost unlimited. Imagine your alarm clock would know
that your train to work is 15 minutes late and adjust itself accordingly. Also your coffee
maker is switched on automatically 15 minutes later to make you a hot cup of coffee
before you leave for work. Sounds like the future ? All that is already possible
today. Ericsson predicts that in 2020 50 billion devices are connected over the internet.
The communication between the huge amount of devices is enabled by IPv6 and
lightweight communication protocols like MQTT.

MQTT :
Definition :
MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight messaging protocol that
provides resource-constrained network clients with a simple way to distribute telemetry
information. The protocol, which uses a publish/subscribe communication pattern, is
used for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and plays an important role in the
Internet of Things (IoT).

History :
MQTT was developed by Andy Stanford-Clark (IBM) and Arlen Nipper (Eurotech; now
Cirrus Link) in 1999 for the monitoring of an oil pipeline through the desert. The goals
were to have a protocol, which is bandwidth-efficient and uses little battery power,
because the devices were connected via satellite link and this was extremely expensive
at that time.
The protocol uses a publish/subscribe architecture in contrast to HTTP with its
request/response paradigm. Publish/Subscribe is event-driven and enables messages to

be pushed to clients. The central communication point is the MQTT broker, it is in charge
of dispatching all messages between the senders and the rightful receivers. Each client
that publishes a message to the broker, includes a topic into the message. The topic is
the routing information for the broker. Each client that wants to receive messages
subscribes to a certain topic and the broker delivers all messages with the matching
topic to the client. Therefore the clients dont have to know each other, they only
communicate over the topic. This architecture enables highly scalable solutions without
dependencies between the data producers and the data consumers.

Real world applications :

Facebook Messenger, Facebook has used aspects of MQTT in Facebook Messenger.
However, it is unclear how much of MQTT is used or for what; Moreover it is to be noted
that this is a phone application not a sensor application.

Why MQTT ?
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is a publish/subscribe protocol
has Multiple Quality of Service levels (QOS)
has at-least-once and exactly-once semantics
has a low overhead (2 bytes at minimum)
supports offline messaging
retains messages, like a key/value store

Publish / Subscribe :
The publish / subscribe (often called pub-sub) pattern lies at the heart of MQTT. Its
based around a message broker, with other nodes arranged around the broker in a star
topology. This is a very different model to the standard client/server approach, and at
first it might seem a little strange, but the decoupling it provides is a huge advantage in
many situations.
Clients can publish or subscribe to particular topics which are somewhat like message
subjects. They are used by the broker to decide who will receive a message. Topics in
MQTT have a particular syntax. They are arranged in a hierarchy using the slash
character (/) as a separator, much like the path in a URL. So a temperature sensor in
your kitchen might publish to a topic like sensors/temperature/home/kitchen.

Security :
Security for MQTT (and IoT devices in general) is a fairly big topic, one which well be
writing about further in the future, but for now, there are two main security features,
authentication and encryption.
Authentication is provided by sending a username and password with the MQTT connect
packet. Almost all brokers and client implementations will support this however it is
vulnerable to interception. To avoid this, TLS should be used if possible.
The protocol itself provides no encryption functionality but since MQTT runs on top of
TCP, we can fairly easily use TLS and thus provide an encrypted connection. This does
however increase the computational complexity of sending and receiving messages,
which can be a problem on constrained systems and will also impact broker
performance.

Broker Software :
There are a number of different broker implementations available. Ill list the most
popular systems here:

Mosquitto - One of the earliest production ready brokers, Mosquitto is written in C

and offers high performance with a lot of configurability.

Mosca - Written in Node.js, this can be embedded in a Node application or run as a

standalone executable. This is our favourite broker due to its easy configuration
and extensibility. Its also very performant.

RSMB - IBMs implementation of the MQTT protocol. This is one of the less popular
options but is a mature system, written in C.

HiveMQ - HiveMQ is a relatively new player, and is oriented towards enterprise

environments. They have a lot of great information about MQTT on their blog.

Conclusion :
MQTT is a fantastic protocol and its applications to IoT and M2M communications are
endless. If youre looking for a very lightweight messaging system, its a great choice
and is likely to become very popular over the next few years. Hopefully this article will be
enough to get you up and running.