What Are These ‘Things’? By @PSilvas | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the set of devices and systems that interconnect real world sensors and actuators to the internet. This includes many different types of systems. These systems connect to the internet or gateway in a variety of manners including long range WiFi/Ethernet using IP protocols (tcp/udp, including cellular), short range Bluetooth low energy, short range Near Field Communications, or other types of medium range radio networks. Point to point radio links and serial lines are also used. There are many sensors that connect directly to the internet and there are others that may need specialized IoT networking hardware. Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), for instance, is a subscribe and publish messaging protocol designed for lightweight machine to machine (M2M) communications. Originally developed by IBM, is now an open standard but its primary purpose is to allow a device to send a very short message one hop to a MQ broker and to receive commands from that broker. It needs a gateway or receiver (broker) to communicate. Basically, every message is published to a location, called a topic, clients (the sensors) subscribe to various topics and when a message is published to the topic, the client/sensor gets it.

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