What are the Advantages of MQTT?
The MQTT protocol allows your SCADA system to access IIoT data. MQTT brings many powerful benefits to your process:
Distribute information more efficiently
Increase scalability
Reduce network bandwidth consumption dramatically
Reduce update rates to seconds
Very well-suited for remote sensing and control
Maximize available bandwidth
Extremely lightweight overhead
Very secure with permission-based security
Used by the oil-and-gas industry, Amazon, Facebook, and other major businesses
Saves development time
Publish/subscribe protocol collects more data with less bandwidth compared to polling protocols
Why Was MQTT Created?
MQTT was created with the goal of collecting data from many devices and then transporting that data to the IT infrastructure. It is lightweight, and therefore ideal for remote monitoring, especially in M2M connections that require a small code footprint or where network bandwidth is limited.
MQTT was invented in 1999 by Dr. Andy Stanford-Clark and Arlen Nipper. Co-inventor Arlen Nipper is the president of Cirrus Link Solutions, the company which developed the Cirrus Link MQTT Modules for Ignition.
How Does MQTT Work?
MQTT is a publish/subscribe protocol that allows edge-of-network devices to publish to a broker. Clients connect to this broker, which then mediates communication between the two devices. Each device can subscribe, or register, to particular topics. When another client publishes a message on a subscribed topic, the broker forwards the message to any client that has subscribed.
MQTT is bidirectional, and maintains stateful session awareness. If an edge-of-network device loses connectivity, all subscribed clients will be notified with the “Last Will and Testament” feature of the MQTT server so that any authorized client in the system can publish a new value back to the edge-of-network device, maintaining bidirectional connectivity.
The lightweightness and efficiency of MQTT makes it possible to significantly increase the amount of data being monitored or controlled. Prior to the invention of MQTT, approximately 80% of data was being left at remote locations, even though various lines of business could have used this data to make smarter decisions. Now MQTT makes it possible to collect, transmit, and analyze more of the data being collected.
Unlike the usual poll/response model of many protocols, which tend to unnecessarily saturate data connections with unchanging data, MQTT's publish/subscribe model maximizes the available bandwidth.
To find out more about how MQTT works go to: http://mqtt.com
