Processing, June 2018

The evolution of MQTT for IIoT Q What is message queuing telemetry transport MQTT and why did you and Andy Stanford Clark of IBM develop it MQTT is a publish subscribe protocol that allows edgeof network devices to publish information to a broker e broker can then forward messages to any client that has subscribed for a particular type of information Its a very e cient way to communicate as it uses very little bandwidth ats one reason its being rapidly adopted for the Industrial Internet of ings IIoT Its even used by Facebook Amazon IBM and many others But for this discussion well focus on industrial uses When we created MQTT I had already been in the SCADA supervisory control and data acquisition industry for 20 years I started with Koch Industries and I worked for them for eight years in their oil re nery and pipeline business I had built SCADA systems for pipelines for tank farm inventory systems and more I had a lot of experience with industrial poll response protocols When AT T was deregulated in the mid 90s it was very disruptive for our industry Most of the infrastructure in the United States had been using multidrop phone lines from AT T en the VSAT very small aperture terminal satellite communication vendors came in and started lling that gap But what they had were proprietary transport protocols over their VSAT systems So we had a double problem we had these poll response protocols and we had to convert them to use proprietary transport protocols Meanwhile Phillips 66 was one of the first companies to get a TCP IP based Transmission Control Protocol Internet Protocol SCADA system But they wanted more information and they wanted it faster over a fairly bandwidth limited network So we looked at it and realized the report by exception protocols that we had been doing that were proprietary were very similar to message oriented middleware With my 20 years in SCADA and Andy coming from a message oriented middleware centric infrastructure from IBM we got together and in six months we took the best of both morphed them together and what came out of that e ort was MQTT Q What is MQTTs key bene ts for manufacturers and process industries in general With MQTT were applying modern IT technology to industrial control systems e primary advantage is that were connecting devices to infrastructure not to applications Because if you look at any migration problem any siloed data problem its because youve gone out and taken an application bought a piece of equipment and then tightly coupled that piece of equipment to that application with a protocol On day one life is great But on day two or week two or year two when you want that information to go to another application or maybe to several applications you suddenly have a problem MQTT lets you decouple devices from applications COVER SERIES Process Automation IIOT WITH ARLEN NIPPER Arlen Nipper is president and chief technical officer CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions One of the inventors of pervasive computing Nipper began working with embedded computers as a coop student with Amoco pipeline in 1978 He began his professional career with Koch Industries as a SCADA engineer for the pipeline and transportation divisions Prior to Cirrus Link Solutions Nipper was president of Arcom Control Systems and president and CTO of Eurotech Inc A vm iStock A 30 Processing JUNE 2018