IoT Protocols

Industrial devices commonly use one of a variety of networking architectures and protocols to communicate with on-premises or on-site controllers, or the cloud. Some of the more common protocols include the following:

 

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), originally developed by IBM, is a lightweight publish and subscribe transport. Senders publish to a “topic” in “namespace” and consumers pick messages off the topic queue. MQTT is designed for short messages such as device telemetry and does not support higher-order concepts like transactions. MQTT can be secured with Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) targets message-oriented middleware but is also used in IoT applications. AMQP, which also implements a publish-and-subscribe architecture, requires a larger on-device footprint and possesses a chattier wire protocol than MQTT, but comes with additional features commonly found in enterprise-class messaging such as transactions, delivery options (at-least-once, at-most-once, exactly-once), and message rejection, among others.