The IBM Websphere Message Queue technology was first conceived in 1993 to address problems in independent and non-concurrent distributed systems to securely communicate. A derivative of the WebSphere Message Queue was authored by Andy Stanford-Clark and Arlen Nipper at IBM in 1999 to address the particular constraints of connecting remote oil and gas pipelines over a satellite connection. That protocol became known as the MQTT. The goals of this IP-based transport protocol are:
- It must be simple to implement
- To provide a form of quality of service
- To be very lightweight and bandwidth efficient
- To be data agnostic
- To have continuous session awareness
- To address security issues
MQTT provides for these requirements. A way to think of the protocol is best defined by the standard body (mqtt.org) which presents a very well-defined summary of the protocol:
MQTT was an internal and proprietary protocol for IBM for many years until being released in version 3.1 in 2010 as a royalty-free product. In 2013, MQTT was standardized and accepted into the OASIS consortium. In 2014, OASIS released it publicly as version MQTT 3.1.1. MQTT is also an ISO standard (ISO/IEC PRF 20922).