On November 3, IBM and Eurotech announced that they are contributing software to accelerate and support the development of a new generation of smarter wireless and mobile devices. The technology, which could become the basis for a new standard of mobile connectivity and interoperability, will be contributed to the Eclipse Foundation open source community.
Originally developed by IBM and Eurotech, the contributed Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is in use today among some industrial, mobile, and consumer applications, providing reliable device connectivity in industries such as transportation, energy, military, financial, social media and medical. Uses of MQTT range across projects as diverse as real-time monitoring for oil pipelines, to a new lightweight mobile messaging application for social media sites.
Enabled by the rapid growth in wireless broadband connectivity, billions of embedded devices – from RFID tag readers, smartphones and cardiac monitors to GPS-aware systems, thermostats and smart appliances – are being interconnected to one another. While estimates of the number of embedded connected devices globally vary (from 5 billion - 10 billion), VDC expects that number will grow exponentially through this decade.
VDC agrees that driving open standards, such as IBM and Eurotech’s MQTT contribution to Eclipse, represents a definitive strategy for rapid and widespread industry adoption. In addition, such a scalable protocol also has the potential to bridge a wide range of platforms and devices including embedded, mobile, Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT.
However, there is still much more to be done before M2M will become truly ubiquitous. Product certification, coordination among mobile standards, ISO 27001 information-security certifications, software, data analytics, data management, etc. all must be better aligned in order for machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions to deliver optimal value.
Finally, if fully supported by the open source community, MQTT could conceivably allow embedded hardware designers, embedded software developers, system developers and integrators to build the foundation for the next generation of applications with higher levels of innovation, connectivity, and functionality that can create "smarter" buildings, industries, and cities.
Two popular current and next-generation M2M solution concepts for the uility and transportation segments are highlighted in the table below.
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