MQTT Could Reshape Enterprise Wireless; Even Facebook Messenger is a Fan 
IBM and Eurotech have contributed software to the Eclipse Foundation to support communications among the next wave of smartphones and wireless devices. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), already in use for Facebook Messenger, is a scalable protocol to easily and quickly connect data from devices with low CPU, memory and limited bandwidth access, officials said.
IBM and Eurotech have contributed software to the Eclipse Foundation to support communications among the next wave of smartphones and wireless devices. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), already in use for Facebook Messenger, is a scalable protocol to easily and quickly connect data from devices with low CPU, memory and limited bandwidth access, officials said.
Even though MQTT has been around for more than a decade, Today, MQTT is attracting attention from many involved with smartphones, texting and other devices that transmit small, burst-type messages, Andy Piper, IBM’s WebSphere Messaging Community Lead told IDN. Even engineers for Facebook’s Messenger mobile messaging app adopted MQTT.
MQTT was built by IBM and Eurotech to accommodate embedded systems or mobile devices with limited memory and CPU, low-bandwidth availability, or devices that use industry-specific operating systems,. “Because MQTT is proven and has many of the right characteristics for the task, we felt making it available as an open source cross-industry messaging technology could support the next wave of wireless,” Piper said.
Under Eclipse, the open source version of MQTT will be open source, royalty-free, and aims to offer many attractive features to mobile devs and operations managers, including the ability to:
- Conserve battery life and memory for mobile devices
- Minimize network traffic loads for sending small, burst-like data (data feeds, texting, etc.)
- Easily share events and alerts with diverse systems in real time
- Eliminate the need to reprogram or reconfigure legacy systems
Facebook’s Lucy Zhang, a software engineer at Facebook, talked about the benefits MQTT brings Facebook Messenger. In her blog post last summer, she wrote:
One of the problems we experienced was long latency when sending a message. The method we were using to send was reliable but slow, and there were limitations on how much we could improve it. With just a few weeks until launch, we ended up building a new mechanism that maintains a persistent connection to our servers. To do this without killing battery life, we used a protocol called MQTT that we had experimented with in Beluga. MQTT is specifically designed for applications like sending telemetry data to and from space probes, so it is designed to use bandwidth and batteries sparingly.HTTP and REST are pervasive for smartphones, but are also heavyweight protocols. Tiny [mobile] devices need lighter-weight alternative such as MQTT.”
Andy Piper
WebSphere Messaging CommunityLead
IBM
By maintaining an MQTT connection and routing messages through our chat pipeline, we were able to often achieve phone-to-phone delivery in the hundreds of milliseconds, rather than multiple seconds.
Piper also compared MQTT to HTTP and REST – two of todays most dominant and popular internet protocols for mobile devices., “HTTP and REST have undeniably become common and pervasive for smartphones, but they are also really heavyweight protocols,” Piper said. “Tiny devices need a lighter-weight alternative. I think about it this way: HTTP is about entire documents; MQTT is more for drip feeds of the text in that document.”
Eclipse Foundation execs are also enthusiastic about MQTT as an open source resource.
“Just as HTTP enabled open communication over the internet, we believe the creation of an open protocol for messaging can do the same for smarter systems,” said Eclipse executive director Mike Milinkovich in a statement. In fact, Eclipse is forming a new Machine-to-Machine Industry Working Group to create an open development environment that will make it easier to integrate and connect systems of systems, he added.
Beyond traditional smartphones, there are other MQTT possibilities. A recent study by Ericsson AB estimates there are some nine billion wireless “connected devices” worldwide, and some 24 billion expected by 2020, Piper noted.
