About this agent

This agent is specially designed to work with the MQTT protocol.

Technology

MQTT is a Client-Server publish/subscribe messaging transport protocol. It is lightweight, open, simple, and designed to be easy to implement. These characteristics make it ideal for use in many situations, including constrained environments for communication in Machine to Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) contexts where a small code footprint is required.

Unlike HTTP’s request/response paradigm, MQTT is event-driven and enables messages to be pushed to clients. This type of architecture decouples the clients from each other to enable a highly scalable solution without dependencies between data producers and data consumers.

At the core of MQTT are the MQTT broker and the MQTT clients (e.g., this agent). The broker is responsible for dispatching messages between the sender and the rightful receivers. An MQTT client publishes a message to a broker, and other clients can subscribe to the broker to receive messages. Each MQTT message includes a topic. A client publishes a message on a specific topic, and MQTT clients subscribe to the topics they want to receive. The MQTT broker uses the topics and the subscriber list to dispatch messages to appropriate clients. Moreover, an MQTT broker is able to buffer messages that cannot be dispatched to MQTT clients that are not connected. This becomes very useful for situations where network connections are unreliable.

Nowadays, MQTT is used in many industries and applications. HiveMQ has published a number of case studies from industries such as automotive, telecommunications, energy, public safety, connected products, and many others.

Related links

• Protocol specifications: MQTT Specs (opens new window)