MQTT is an OASIS standard for IoT connectivity. It is a publish/subscribe, extremely simple and lightweight messaging protocol, designed for constrained devices and low-bandwidth, high-latency or unreliable networks. The design principles are to minimise network bandwidth and device resource requirements whilst also attempting to ensure reliability and some degree of assurance of delivery. These principles also turn out to make the protocol ideal of the “Internet of Things” world of connected devices, and for mobile applications where bandwidth and battery power are at a premium.

MQTT was invented by Dr Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM, and Arlen Nipper of Arcom (now Eurotech), in 1999.

MQTT has been widely implemented across a variety of industries since 1999. A few of the more interesting examples are listed on the Use Case page.

v5.0 and v3.1.1 are now OASIS standards (v3.1.1 has also been ratified by ISO).

Yes. TCP/IP port 1883 is reserved with IANA for use with MQTT. TCP/IP port 8883 is also registered, for using MQTT over SSL.

You can pass a user name and password with an MQTT packet in V3.1 of the protocol. Encryption across the network can be handled with SSL, independently of the MQTT protocol itself (it is worth noting that SSL is not the lightest of protocols, and does add significant network overhead). Additional security can be added by an application encrypting data that it sends and receives, but this is not something built-in to the protocol, in order to keep it simple and lightweight.

The specification and other documentation are available via the Specification page. Ask questions via one of the methods on StackOverflow. Try code via one of the projects on the Software page.

A broker is a server that routes published messages to subscribers.

A connection between two MQTT brokers

Really Small Message Broker from IBM, now part of the Eclipse Mosquitto project

Last Will and Testament.

Machine-to-Machine

Machine-to-Machine Industry Working Group at Eclipse

Internet of Things

Eclipse Paho messaging project.

Quality of Service levels