Telecom operators build tens of millions of IoT device management platforms based on the MQTT protocol

MQTT is a standard messaging protocol for the Internet of Things. It is designed as a very lightweight publish/subscribe messaging, which is very suitable for connecting remote devices with a small code footprint and network bandwidth. The MQTT protocol has the following characteristics:

• lightweight and efficient. : MQTT client is very small and requires less equipment resources. The MQTT message header is very small, which can optimize network bandwidth.
• Two-way communication : MQTT allows message transfer from device to cloud and cloud to device.
• Reliable message delivery : MQTT has 3 defined service quality levels: 0-at most once, 1-at least once, 2-exactly once. The reliability of message delivery can be guaranteed according to business scenarios.
• supports unreliable networks : Many IoT devices connect via unreliable cellular networks. MQTT's support for persistent sessions reduces the time it takes to reconnect the client and the broker.
• Security : MQTT allows you to easily encrypt messages with TLS and authenticate clients using modern authentication protocols such as OAuth.

Today, MQTT is widely used in industries such as automobiles, manufacturing, telecommunications, oil and gas.

This series of articles will explain in detail how the MQTT protocol plays a role in the actual application scenarios of various industries.

Challenges Faced by Telecom Operators' Edge Device Management

The traditional mobile service and fixed-line broadband service markets of telecom operators are becoming saturated, and the competition among the three major operators has become increasingly fierce. Under the national policy of speeding up speed and reducing fees, the revenue of traditional businesses has been declining and the development space is limited. In the future, 5G end users, 5G applications, and a large number of smart IoT devices will be an important incremental market for operators.

Telecom operators' access network (including wireless), transmission network, core network, metropolitan area network and other networks have achieved complete network management through SNMP, CLI, Netconf, TR069 and other protocols, but for massive edge gateways (enterprise or home) And IoT device management still needs to be improved, facing the following challenges:

• Mass equipment management is difficult: As of 2020, the total amount of China's Internet of Things equipment and edge gateways has exceeded 10 billion, and the annual growth rate of Internet of Things equipment has exceeded 60%. Traditional carrier-grade OSS systems cannot support equipment management on such a scale.
• No independent management IP for devices: Massive IoT devices and edge gateways do not have independent management IPs, and device management cannot be achieved through traditional SNMP, CLI, NETCONF and other protocols.
• Reliable communication under low power consumption and weak network environment: IoT devices have limited resources and low power consumption requirements, requiring light-weight network protocols for management.
• Low latency requirements: Some 5G vertical application scenarios (such as industrial control and Internet of Vehicles) have high requirements for message latency.

MQTT-based Internet of Things last mile network management

With the rapid development of IoT technology, the lightweight MQTT protocol has gradually become the mainstream IoT protocol and is widely used in IoT device message communication. The MQTT protocol also perfectly solves the above-mentioned problems faced by operators on the edge of IoT.

Schematic diagram of operator Internet of Things MQTT message access

Take EMQ's cloud-side integrated solution for operators as an example:

EMQ cloud-side integrated solution for operators

Use the MQTT protocol to unify access to a large number of edge devices

For industrial manufacturing, mining wisdom, power and other energy scenarios involved Modbus, OPC-UA, IEC and other different types of industrial PLC protocol, it can start by EMQ provided Things edge industrial protocol gateway software Neuron unified conversion It becomes the MQTT protocol, and then builds the IoT management platform through the EMQ X high-availability, distributed cluster architecture to realize the connection, movement and subsequent processing and analysis of device data, and solve the problem of massive device management.

MQTT publish-subscribe mode solves equipment management problems

Traditional telecom management protocols such as SNMP, NETCONF, TRO69, etc. are all based on the "request/response" model, while the advantage of MQTT based on the "publish/subscribe" model lies in the decoupling of publishers and subscribers: subscribers and publishers do not need to Establish a direct connection and do not need to be online at the same time. This solves the problem that there is no fixed management IP, and the device management can be easily realized after the device is connected.

Reliable communication adapted to edge device hardware and network requirements

Compared with other network management communication protocols, the MQTT protocol can achieve stable transmission on severely limited hardware devices and low-bandwidth, high-latency networks. Edge devices can extend MQTT protocol communication by integrating MQTT SDK. At the same time, the message caching capability of the EMQ cloud edge integrated solution at the edge can temporarily cache data locally on the edge device, ensuring that the real-time data reporting process will not lose data due to temporary network instability, and realize messages under weak networks. Reliable communication.

Implement edge computing based on MQTT IoT Hub

The massive amount of data going to the cloud will bring huge bandwidth costs and data storage costs to the cloud platform. In the future, 75% of IoT traffic will be calculated at the edge. In the EMQ cloud-edge integrated solution, the message access is aggregated to the edge platform through Edge, and then data flow cleaning and function calculation are performed through eKuiper to achieve traffic peak-filling and cleaning, and finally the processed data is passed through MQTT The protocol is forwarded to the cloud.

Realize cloud-side collaborative management based on MQTT protocol

In order to better realize the integrated management of cloud-side-end, EMQ not only supports the KubeEdge cloud-side collaboration capabilities based on the WebSocket/QUIC protocol, but also independently developed the Edge Manager Tunnel component based on the MQTT protocol, which can realize plug-in management and configuration management. Cloud-side collaboration capabilities such as rule management, object model synchronization, function computing distribution and deployment.

Benefits and value brought to operators by using MQTT

Easy management of massive edge devices

Give full play to the network advantages of operators, realize the management of massive edge gateways and IoT devices, open up cloud-side (network)-end end-to-end management capabilities, and deepen cloud-network integration and cloud-network collaboration integrated solutions for operators Provide the basis.

Low power consumption, energy saving and emission reduction

The lightweight feature of the MQTT protocol greatly reduces the hardware requirements from the client to the server. By dynamically modifying the KeepAlive time of MQTT, the semi-sleep state management of the device can also be realized, which greatly reduces the power consumption of the device while saving hardware costs.

Huge incremental market

Based on the MQTT protocol, operators can easily build a group or provincial IoT application platform, provide government, enterprise, and home users with IoT device access management and digital value-added services, and open up a potentially huge incremental market.

Facilitate digital transformation

Through the construction of IoT platforms based on MQTT, CoAP and other protocols, telecom operators have transformed from traditional network pipeline operators to network operations as the main body, achieving cloud-network integration and digital solutions in one digital transformation.

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Original link: https://www.emqx.com/zh/blog/application-of-mqtt-protocol-in-carriers

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