Multi-protocol bridge generation for M2M communication using MQTT

Abstract

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is known as a quasi-standard for IoT application communication between IoT devices and OPC UA (Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture) is the de facto standard that enables M2M communication in modern industry 4.0. But there are also industrial machines that still use RESTful (Representational State Transfer) APIs as their only communication interface. Integrating machines with these three protocols into automated manufacturing processes and enact a machine to machine communication between them can be challenging. This paper demonstrates how a M2M communication supporting HTTP, MQTT and OPC UA can be implemented using MQTT as the communication protocol. Furthermore, the goal is to create a model for each bridge that can be used to create interface mappings from MQTT to HTTP or from MQTT to OPC UA. This model can then easily be used to generate MQTT clients that bridge the different protocols and enable the M2M communication between machines to share their information.