How to Get Started with the lightweight IoT Protocol Introduction

How to Get Started with the lightweight IoT Protocol
Introduction

Everybody talks about the Internet of Things nowadays. Increasingly affordable micro controllers like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are enabling cheap devices that measure sensor data and send it over the internet. The goal of this post is to introduce the lightweight protocol MQTT and its capabilities to send data between devices and other systems and to demonstrate them by implementing two clients with Eclipse Paho.

The term Internet of Things was first used by Kevin Ashton in 2009 for interconnecting physical devices over the internet. The basic idea is very simple: Physical devices can exchange data between each other or being controlled by others. Examples of such devices would be a refrigerator, a car, a building or basically any other electronic device. One of the most common use cases is the collection, transmission, consolidation and displaying of sensor data. The results could be a web dashboard with the aggregated values or an alarm, when a threshold is exceeded.
The application scenarios are almost unlimited. Imagine your alarm clock would know that your train to work is 15 minutes late and adjust itself accordingly. Also your coffee maker is switched on automatically 15 minutes later to make you a hot cup of coffee before you leave for work. Sounds like the future ? All that is already possible today. Ericsson predicts that in 2020 50 billion devices are connected over the internet. The communication between the huge amount of devices is enabled by IPv6 and lightweight communication protocols like MQTT.