Introduction to Internet of Things

Prof. Sudip Misra

Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Lecture - 06
Basics of IoT Networking-Part-II

So, we are now going to continue our discussions on the basic issues, basic aspects of the
networking in internet of things. So, we have already seen the different fundamental
issues that are out there. Now, we are going to look at the different protocols that are
there that can be used for something different purposes in IoT.

(Refer Slide Time: 00:44)

Now, based on the different functionalities, there are actually large numbers of protocols
that are proposed for use in IoT. So, based on the functionality, these protocols are
classified in this in this manner. So, this is just a classification that has been shown, but
this is not unique classification in anyway and it should be constituted in that manner.
So, this is just a classification attempt under different categories that is shown and here
as we can see the different protocols for something.

These classifiers you know a different issues are also mentioned in brackets like this. So,
it is basically not possible and also not required to go through all these different
protocols. So, we have selected only a few protocols from this you know red coloured
category and this is what we are going to discuss in this particular course.
(Refer Slide Time: 01:55)

So, we will start with the MQTT protocol first and this MQTT, the full form of this is
Message Queue Telemetry Transport. So, it is an ISO standard which is based on publish
subscribe model. So, basically you know what happens is there is some kind of
publishing of the data and then, the fetching of the data by the subscribers. So, this is
how this publish subscribe model works and MQTT basically what it has done is, this
publish subscribe model, it has been made lightweight through the use of this protocol,
so that this lightweight protocol can be used in conjunction with the TCP IP protocol
suit. This is what MQTT supports.

MQTT going back to the history was introduced in 1999 by IBM and is standardized in
2013 by Oasis. This is a standardization organization oasis. So, it has standardized in the
year 2013. So, this particular protocol does couple of things. One is offering connectivity
between different embedded devices between the applications and then, middle ware of
one device and network and communication on the other side of the device. So, we have
connectivity between applications and middle ware for one side and the networks and
communication on the other. This is what MQTT does.
(Refer Slide Time: 03:32)

So, in MQTT there are three concepts that are involved. The first we are going to go
through is the concept of a message broker and first, we are going to go through some of
these concepts and there after I am going to show you pictorially how MQTT functions.
So, we have a message broker; the concept of a message broker that basically serves like
a broker which takes control of publishing of the messages and subscription of the
messages. So, publish subscribe is basically controlled by the message broker, number 1.
Number 2 is there is a concept of topic and this is what the client is subscribed and based
on the updates. The data are sent to the clients by the message broker, this data are
distributed by the message broker to the clients who have subscribed to the services.

So, this is design for remote connections limited bandwidth environments and MQTT,
basically the advantage is that it provides every small code foot print. So, basically you
know by writing only a small piece of code, one would be able to achieve all these
different functions that I have just mentioned.
(Refer Slide Time: 04:48)

The different components of MQTT are as follows. We have three principle components.
The publishers which involve the different sensors, the subscribers and that means, those
entities, those applications, those units that are interested in the data that is published by
the sensors. Number 3 is the broker in between which helps the publishers and the
subscribers connect to one another and also help in classifying the sensor data into
different topics.

(Refer Slide Time: 05:29)

In MQTT there are a few different methods. One is connect, the second is disconnect,
subscribe, unsubscribe and publish. So, basically the connect method helps to connect
with the server, helps to connects this device with the server. Then, disconnect is the
opposite. Whenever it is no longer required to be to remain connected, the disconnect
method helps in disconnecting from the server from TCP IP service offerings and so on.
And then comes the subscribe which is basically subscribing to the services and
unsubscribe is the opposite that whenever it is no longer required to continue with
getting the different data offerings, the data services and so on.

The unsubscribe method can be executed and then, we have the publish method which is
basically publishing data for maybe you know publishing the data from these different
sensors or these different devices to the broker for it to be fetched by the different
application clients.

(Refer Slide Time: 06:49)

So, this is what I was referring to just a short while back. So, what we have is these
pictorial depictions of how these publish subscribe model works in the case of MQTT.
So, we have a temperature sensor, we have laptops, we have mobile devices. This
temperature sensor in this example publishes the temperature which is basically brokered
at this MQTT broker. So, what this fellow does is, it broker you know because it is a
broker between the different clients and different other application serving devices which
required the data which can subscribe to the data that is published by these different
sensors.

So, what it is going to do is, first it is going to get the subscription requests from these
different clients, the mobile device, the laptop and so on and so forth. So, first is the
subscribed and there after it is published. So, what is published? The temperature is
published. Where is the temperature residing? It is fetched from the sensor and it is being
brokered at the MQTT broker. So, from those devices, those clients which have basically
subscribed to the services, they are going to get this sensing updates, the sensor data
updates.

(Refer Slide Time: 08:27)

So, when we look at the communication, the architecture that is followed is publish
subscribe publish subscribe architecture and not the request response architecture that is
typically followed by traditional http which is used for the internet, this publish subscribe
model is event driven. That means, whenever there is an event, whenever there is a fire,
when the temperature increases, whenever a camera may be an IoT camera basically
observes some kind of change in the environment or whatever maybe there is an intruder
or whatever it is, so the central communication point.

So, it is sorry, I am sorry. So, what we have is it is event driven. So, whenever there is
some kind of an event and those data are basically pushed to the clients, so these
messages basically are pushed to the clients and then, we have this broker which is in-
charge of dispatching all the messages between the senders and receivers and each client
that publishes a message to the broker includes a topic into the message and this is the
topic which is very much important in the case of MQTT and this is the topic which is of
interest to these application clients.

(Refer Slide Time: 10:02)

So, each client that wants to receive the messages subscribes to a certain topic and the
broker delivers all the messages with in the matching topic to the client. So, essentially
what is happening is the clients, they do not have to know each other and what is
required is they only need to communicate with each other over the topic. So, they do not
know about each other and this architecture basically appears to be a scalable
architecture with a scalable solution. There is not much dependency between the
producers and the consumers of the data and that is where MQTT is very popular.
(Refer Slide Time: 10:43)

In MQTT we have the concept of the topic as I just mentioned a minute back and this
topic is nothing, but a simple string that can have more hierarchical levels which are
separated by a slash. In this manner a sample topic for sending the temperature data of
the living room could be marked in this manner, could be named in this manner. So, we
have house, a smart house kind of scenario. We have house and within the house we
have living room and the temperature that is collected from this particular living room is
of interest. So, this topic that is of interest and this is a sample, this is an example of how
the topic for sending temperature data of a living room looks like.

So, on one hand the client like a mobile device, a laptop or whatever can subscribe to the
exact topic or on the other hand, it can also use a wildcard. So, this is an example of an
exact topic. Wildcard could also be used.
(Refer Slide Time: 12:01)

Wildcards can be used in different ways based on the different levels the subscription to
house/+/temperature results in all messages sent to the previously mentioned topic,
house/living room/temperature as well as any topic with an arbitrary value in the place of
a living room such as house/kitchen/temperature.

So, basically you know this plus sign is a wildcard character which only allows arbitrary
values for one hierarchy. If more than one hierarchical level is required, the multilevel
wildcard is used. So, this is single level wildcard. The plus one is a single level wildcard
and this hash sign is as multilevel wide wildcard. It allows to subscribe to all underlying
hierarchical levels. For example, house/# is for subscribing to all topics beginning with
house.
(Refer Slide Time: 13:06)

Different applications that use MQTT, Facebook messenger for online chat, Amazon
website service use Amazon IoT with MQTT, Microsoft Azure IoT hub uses MQTT as
its main protocol. For telemetry messages, the EVRYTHNG IoT platform uses MQTT as
an M2M protocol for connecting several products and devices. Adafruit uses MT MQTT
cloud service for IoT experimenter’s caller Adafruit IO.

(Refer Slide Time: 13:45)

Finally after understanding the overall philosophy behind MQTT, let us now quickly
review the secured version of MQTT which is called the secure MTTM MQTT, the
secure MQTT or SMQTT in short. So, this is known in both these ways and this actually
to me is quite similar in notion to http and https, the secure http. So, we have http secure
http, we have MQTT secure MQTT.

So, secure MQTT is an extension of MQTT. So, basically it is an extension of the MQTT
that we just discussed by using different security features such as encryption and so on.
The advantage of such encryption is the broadcast encryption feature in which one
message is encrypted and delivered to multiple other nodes which is quite common in
IoT applications. In general, the algorithm consists of four main stages i.e. the setup
stage, the encryption stage, the publish stage and the decryption stage. So, setup
encryption publish and decryption.

(Refer Slide Time: 15:03)

In setup phase, the subscribers and publishers register themselves to the broker and get a
master secret key according to the developer’s choice of key generation algorithm. So,
depending on what key generation algorithm is used, the subscribers and the publishers
register themselves to the broker and get a master secret key according to that particular
algorithm.

So, when the data is published, it is encrypted and published by the broker which sends it
to the subscribers which is finally decrypted at the subscriber end having the same
master secret key. The key generation and encryption algorithms are not standardized
SMQ. SMQTT is proposed only to enhance the security aspects of MQTT.
So, in this part of the lecture on basic topics on IoT networks, what we have done is
primarily we have gone through two protocols. We have seen that there is an assortment
of different protocols that they have to support the networking of IoT, but in this
particular part of the lecture, we have focussed mostly on two protocols. One is the
SMTT and the other one is, sorry MQTT and the other one is SMQTT which is basically
the secure version of MQTT.

So, we are going to go through few other protocols in the next lecture and from that we
can use them finally to establish to build different platforms for IoT in a small scale or
even in the larger scale.

Thank you.