MQTT

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a minimal publish-subscribe protocol designed for constrained devices and unreliable networks. Devices publish messages to named topics on a central broker; applications subscribe to the topics they care about. The pattern decouples producers from consumers: a sensor does not need to know who reads its data, and new consumers can subscribe without touching the device.

Its efficiency — tiny packet overhead, configurable delivery guarantees, last-will messages that announce when a device drops offline — made it the de facto standard for IoT telemetry, and increasingly for industrial data via the Sparkplug B specification, which adds standardized topic structure and payload semantics on top of plain MQTT.

In an operations platform, MQTT is usually the northbound path: gateways collect data from local protocols like Modbus or BACnet and publish it over MQTT to the platform. Native MQTT ingestion is also the simplest way for third-party and custom devices to join a platform's data fabric.