The vision of the Internet of Things is inspiring, if much-hyped. Billions of digital devices, from smartphones to sensors in homes, cars and machines of all kinds, will communicate with each other to automate tasks and make life better.
But some daunting obstacles litter the road to this mechanized nirvana. A crucial challenge is figuring out how all the smartish gadgets will talk to each other. A group of technology companies â€" including Cisco Systems, I.B.M., Red Hat and Tibco â€" thinks a technology with a mouthful of a name is the answer. On Thursday, they are officially introducing the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol as an open standard through an international standards organization, Oasis.
MQTT, the less-than-catchy abbreviation for the software, is not really a lingua franca for machine-to-machine communication, but a messenger and carrier for data exchange. MQTT’s advocates compare its potential role in the Internet of Things to that played by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, on the Web. HTTP is the foundation of data communication on the Web.
MQTT’s origins go back nearly two decades. Its co-inventor, Andy Stanford-Clark, who holds the title of distinguished engineer at I.B.M., has long been a passionate home-automation tinkerer. His laboratory has been his house, a 16th-century stone cottage with a thatched roof on the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel. His electronic gadgets range from temperature and energy monitors to an automated mousetrap. His TedX talk explains the back story.
His home automation projects required machine-to-machine data communication, and Mr. Stanford-Clark wrote his own code.
At I.B.M. he became immersed in the technology for machine-to-machine communication in the late 1990s, when the company was working with industry partners to mine sensor data from offshore oil rigs for preventive and predictive maintenance.
One of those industry partners was Arlen Nipper, an American engineer and expert in embedded systems for oil field equipment. Together they wrote the initial version of MQTT in 1998. They kept improving their open-source messenger software over the years.
“Our goal was to give it enough legs so that it could make a difference,†Mr. Stanford-Clark said.
It has made steady progress, and is used by many industrial companies and others. Facebook, for example, has adopted MQTT for the live notifications it sends to Facebook users on devices running Apple’s iOS software â€" that is, iPhones and iPads.
Formally going through the standardization process is an endorsement that should help further. And there is increasing demand for machine-to-machine communications. Vijay Sankaran, director of application development for Ford, said improved message-handling technology will be vital to the company’s plans for automated diagnostics and new consumer services.
Mr. Sankaran pointed to two examples. In the Focus Electric car, he said, Ford wants to get continual, detailed sensor data on the state and performance of the vehicle’s electric battery, then feed that information into product development.
And drivers, Mr. Sankaran said, seek to do more things while in their cars. A stock trader, for example, might want to continue trading from the road. If the trader sent in an order to sell 30,000 shares of Apple, he said, that transaction must be reliably and securely communicated.
“You need an advanced messaging engine for these kinds of services,†Mr. Sankaran said.
For MQTT to emerge as a major standard, used across the industrial landscape, it will need backing beyond the Oasis consortium. Oasis is heavy on information technology companies rather than industrial technology heavyweights including General Electric, Honeywell, Siemens and United Technologies.
These companies make many of the sensor-equipped big things in the so-called Internet of Things â€" like jet engines, power turbines and oil field equipment.
