ReadWriteWeb

Every addressable resource on the Web has what W3C now calls a Uniform Resource Identifier (not URL, but URI). Anything that can provide information to a client in response to a request, may be addressed using this syntax. It takes care the what, where, and how.

How will the Internet of Things make everything addressable by every other thing, as explicitly promised by IBM - which is proposing one candidate for an IoT protocol in the form of MQTT? In the concluding part of ReadWriteWeb's discussion with MQTT engineer and WebSphere MQ community lead Andy Piper (continued from part 2 last Tuesday), we learned how IBM is actually now in its second decade of working out a kind of "thing taxonomy" - a way for its messaging queue protocol to resolve the where and how of contacting a small, MQTT-enabled device by first sorting through what it is.

Although we've described it as a separate Web for devices, not people, Andy Piper of IBM's WebSphere MQ messaging team emphatically describes MQTT protocol in ways that are not at all analogous to the HTTP protocol we're accustomed to. Endpoint devices with low battery power and extremely limited networking - the kind embedded in sewer pipes whose purpose may be to send a signal meaning, "I'm not broken" - do not need a browser. And besides, they couldn't handle one if you tried.

It makes MQTT a very limited wire protocol, one whose only purposes are to let a device send a very short message one hop up the chain to an MQ broker, and to receive push-button-like commands from that broker. So what's to stop someone from building a similar device, planting it in the vicinity of the broker, and making it send the signal instead? Or to have a process impersonate a device through the Web - the one you and I use - that the MQ broker may mistakenly interpret to be from the device... say, from an ATM machine? ReadWriteWeb raised that issue with IBM's Andy Piper, in a continuation of our interview from last Friday.

He is officially called the "Messaging Community Lead" for IBM's WebSphere message queue (MQ) architecture, which is a title that grants some modicum of honor without claiming too much authority. Andy Piper has become IBM's point man for the concept of a planet enmeshed in billions, perhaps trillions, of signal-sending, communicating devices. The case may be made that anything that can be "on" could be made to send a signal on a network - perhaps something as simple as "on" itself, periodically. The possibilities for a world where the operating status of any electronic device may be measured from any point on the globe, are astounding.

The openly stated goal from IBM is to produce a completely new world-wide web, one comprised of the messages that digitally empowered devices would send to one another. It is the same Internet, but not the same Web. This morning in Ludwigsburg, Germany, IBM announced it is joining with Italy-based hardware architecture firm Eurotech in donating a complete draft protocol for asynchronous inter-device communication to the Eclipse Foundation.

It would be the current data explosion, times itself. A projected 24 billion simultaneous devices by the year 2020, including RFID tags on shipping crates, heart rate monitors, GPS devices, smartphone firmware, automobile maintenance systems, and yes, not a joke, earrings may become more socially active than any teenage human being presently alive. Tens of billions of devices, billions of messages per hour.

MQTT is an IBM-developed protocol for real-time messaging that could become a keystone of the emerging Internet of Things. As the BBC explained recently, MQTT (which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is "a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world." MQTT is used as a messaging protocol for sensor and actuator solutions - for example in the house that twitters, which we covered earlier this week.

According to one of its creators, Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, MQTT is "going to explode" in popularity this year and next year. The protocol has just turned 10 years old; indeed there was a party to celebrate in London this week. In this post we explain MQTT and look at a health care product that uses it.