The vision of the Internet of Things is inspiring, if much-hyped. Billions of digital devices, from smartphones to sensors in homes, cars and machines of all kinds, will communicate with each other to automate tasks and make life better.But some daunting obstacles litter the road to this mechanized nirvana. A crucial challenge is figuring out how all the smartish gadgets will talk to each other. A group of technology companies — including Cisco Systems, I.B.M., Red Hat and Tibco — thinks a technology with a mouthful of a name is the answer. On Thursday, they are officially introducing the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol as an open standard through an international standards organization, Oasis.
MQTT, the less-than-catchy abbreviation for the software, is not really a lingua franca for machine-to-machine communication, but a messenger and carrier for data exchange. MQTT’s advocates compare its potential role in the Internet of Things to that played by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, on the Web. HTTP is the foundation of data communication on the Web.
MQTT’s origins go back nearly two decades. Its co-inventor, Andy Stanford-Clark, who holds the title of distinguished engineer at I.B.M., has long been a passionate home-automation tinkerer. His laboratory has been his house, a 16th-century stone cottage with a thatched roof on the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel. His electronic gadgets range from temperature and energy monitors to an automated mousetrap. His TedX talk explains the back story.
by Steve Lohr, NY Times | Read more:
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