PubNub Announces MQTT Support and New IoT Capabilities

At PubNub, we’ve learned a lot from IoT customers like Samsung, August Home, Wink, and Logitech about the types of features they require. We’re excited to announce that we have taken all our expanded PubNub Data Stream Network (DSN) features, like Functions, topic wildcard support, and simple setup, and have made them available to our customers with MQTT devices. It is now super easy to integrate MQTT devices into the PubNub DSN. No code changes are required; simply put your pub/sub credentials into your device identifier, and PubNub takes care of the rest. This blog will walk you through the steps involved in this integration.

MQTT Background, History, and Design Philosophy

If you aren’t familiar with MQTT, the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a publish/subscribe protocol aimed specifically at low-powered embedded devices. MQTT targets low-powered embedded device environments where resources are scarce, and strives to reduce battery, CPU, and bandwidth consumption. Originally developed at IBM,

has picked up a lot of traction in the IoT industry, especially for its lower power requirements. There are plenty of documentation and open source client implementations if you wish to dive further into the protocol itself.

PubNub and MQTT – Better Together

You may already have deployed MQTT IOT-based devices. Or you may be considering a new IoT deployment. Either way, the question arises, “When should I use MQTT, and when should I use PubNub?” And when does it make sense to use both? If you are considering robust, bi-directional communication options for your

, PubNub provides enterprise-grade security, scalability and reliability, and many value-added features too, like functions-as-a-service and message storage and playback. The PubNub DSN is available worldwide with <250ms latency, and can scale to support all your Internet-connected devices. Like the proverbial peanut butter and chocolate, PubNub and MQTT together can elegantly solve many embedded device use cases. You can leverage PubNub with MQTT to satisfy use cases like low-latency, efficient anomaly detection, and integrating to machine leanring services. If MQTT is not part of your current infrastructure, you might consider leveraging the PubNub DSN directly along with PubNub’s numerous IoT SDKs for all of your Internet of Things connectivity. Or the PubNub DSN with MQTT can be a great choice for low-powered devices.