MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport)

Many of our customers, and we as well, require flexible, above all scalable solutions in the digitization strategy in order to transfer process data. If we want to send data across different locations, the MQTT protocol is ideal.

But how do you design a solution to provide the different stakeholders in the company with just the data they need for their area? In response, we developed an MQTT cluster with multiple redundant nodes last year. It has been live since January 1, 2023 and we would like to introduce it here.

How does our MQTT cluster function?

MQTT is a protocol via which a client and a server can communicate with each other. In short, a protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). MQTT offers a lot of advantages for data transmission – such as economical data volume and TLS encryption. This means there is no need for external encryption via VPN.

Clients send their data to certain “topics” at the broker and can “subscribe” to desired topics in return. This works in a similar way to a newsletter subscription. The clients can be organized in star topology, so new clients can be added especially easily. This results in a highly scalable solution, a well thought-out topic structure is mandatory for this!

This Message Oriented Middleware solution (MOM) enables us to provide our customers with a reliable interface between IT and OT!

All the complexity remains hidden from the client. From his perspective, there is simply a highly available MQTT connection over which data can be exchanged between different devices and applications.

Failure and IT security

In addition to the aforementioned encrypted data transmission using TLS, the MQTT cluster itself has a multi-redundant design and is therefore built as a highly available, scalable decentralized architecture solution that we make available to our customers.

With this architecture, which we developed on the basis of MQTT, VerneMQ and internal encryption with Nebula, we are throwing many of the previous limitations overboard. Not only does it eliminate the risk of single-point-of-failure, the design also allows us to scale horizontally quickly and easily if necessary, meaning that we can expand the cluster with additional MQTT nodes to distribute the workload evenly when the load increases.

This is how you can imagine it…

Gaining information from data, made easy!

Large, unwieldy Excel files that are difficult to maintain and in which errors that are difficult to recognize creep in again and again are now a thing of the past.

With the help of the MQTT cluster, it is now possible to transmit, save and evaluate all process and production values from different locations live every second! You can generate and calculate reports, live KPIs, alarms, OEE values and much more via a connected information platform.

This greatly simplifies reporting processes at all levels of the company and significantly increases reporting accuracy, as the necessary calculation values are retrieved directly from the data source in real time.

MQTT: The highlights:

• We transfer data in real time and can do without a VPN connection.
• We simply collect the data in databases and can make it available without major hurdles, develop models, perform analyses faster, and also provide our controls on the PLC with calculations ranging from soft sensors to elaborate AI tools.
• And last but not least, we can also make them tangible for our customers – with the specially developed web-based data platform.

…and that’s why we love MQTT!