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The benefits of MQTT for smart buildings

We asked our in-house expert, Chris Green, to lend his voice and explain the concept and benefits of MQTT for smart buildings in an easy-to-digest FAQ format:

Benefits of MQTT for smart buildings

What is MQTT protocol?

MQTT is what is known as a publish and subscribe system. Devices that use it can publish (transmit) and/or subscribe (receive) information, making it good for transferring information between devices and internet-based systems.

It was invented in 1999 by Dr. Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM and Arlen Nipper of Arcom (now Eurotech). Originally intended to be a cost-effective way to connect monitoring devices used in the oil and gas industries to remote servers, MQTT is now used by thousands of businesses and applications worldwide.

How can smart-building sensor technology benefit modern companies?

More and more companies are seeing the benefits of using smart sensors to help their buildings talk. Smart-building sensor technology allows you to detect, measure and monitor energy use, air quality, temperature, machine performance, occupancy and more, all in real time.

How do IoT devices ensure minimal data transmission?

Because IoT devices are often small, battery-powered devices, they use protocols such as EnOcean to communicate, ensuring that the data they transmit is as small as possible – often only a few bytes. This means that the raw data coming from the sensors is absolutely minimal, often just a number with no clear meaning.

What is the role of a Gateway in processing and transmitting IoT data?

It is the job of the receiving device, the Gateway, to make that data more useful, format it in a standard fashion (JSON), and then send that data to a server or cloud platform to be analysed and made us of.

How do smart building sensors manage mass data transmission across multiple gateways and sites?

The nature of smart building sensors means that a vast amount of sensors can be communicating at once, through multiple Gateways and even from multiple sites. So how do we ensure that the data reaches the right places, without any data loss, network congestion or overwhelming servers with mountains of data?

The answer is the MQTT protocol.

How does an MQTT Broker streamline the handling of data from multiple sensors?

Rather than configuring SQL connections from Gateways which need to be maintained, or ensuring that data from different sensors is sent to different places, all of the data can be sent directly to an MQTT Broker. An MQTT Broker acts like a Post Office – receiving all the data which the sensor network can throw at it, and “publishing” it to allow other services to access it. Different services can then “subscribe” to the data types that they want.

How does the publish-and-subscribe model of the MQTT Broker allow for efficient data management?

While the MQTT Broker might be receiving data from air quality sensors, energy sensors, occupancy sensors and more, an energy management system or a meeting room booking system can subscribe only to the sensor data that is relevant. A database such as InFluxDB or SQL can subscribe to all the topics and store the data for backup purposes, but different systems can take the data they want in real-time directly from the MQTT Broker.

Why is the separation of the data source and the receiver beneficial for data management?

By using this publish-and-subscribe model, there is one easy-to-access source for all the data coming from all different sensor types. No unnecessary data will reach the servers analysing the data, and any changes made to the back-end only need to be maintained with the broker. This separation of the data source and the receiver prevents having to reconfigure hardware in the field, or make significant changes to handle different data formats.

What are the key features that make MQTT scalable and efficient?

MQTT is inherently scalable, and can handle a single sensor or many thousands of sensors easily. Support for TLS enables data to be sent securely, and MQTT data itself is designed to be highly efficient – a single MQTT packet can contain as little as two bytes of data, minimising the effect on network bandwidth.

Why has the Internet of Things largely adopted the MQTT protocol?

The Internet Of Things world has largely adopted MQTT for the reasons discussed above. Whilst the protocol predates the Internet of Things by some decades, the efficiency of the protocol lends itself very well to cloud computing and services which require a high rate of transfer of small, time-sensitive data such as sensor outputs.

Chris Green

A customer-facing Technical Support Engineer, passionate about delivering innovative solutions to complex problems through the use of IoT. With nearly two decades of experience in the electronics industry, Chris has developed a customer-first approach and his product expertise, combined with his sense of humour makes him a well-respected authority on intelligent workplaces.

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