IBM Open-Sources Potential “Internet of Things” Protocol

The openly stated goal from IBM is to produce a completely new world-wide web, one comprised of the messages that digitally empowered devices would send to one another. It is the same Internet, but not the same Web. This morning in Ludwigsburg, Germany, IBM announced it is joining with Italy-based hardware architecture firm Eurotech in donating a complete draft protocol for asynchronous inter-device communication to the Eclipse Foundation.

It would be the current data explosion, times itself. A projected 24 billion simultaneous devices by the year 2020, including RFID tags on shipping crates, heart rate monitors, GPS devices, smartphone firmware, automobile maintenance systems, and yes, not a joke, earrings may become more socially active than any teenage human being presently alive. Tens of billions of devices, billions of messages per hour.

It is being called Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, the machine-to-machine counterpart of HTTP. This afternoon, ReadWriteWeb was granted exclusive access to the draft proposal, which is being officially received by the Eclipse Foundation later this morning...