Mastering Internet of Things

Managing interoperability

The lack of content metadata in MQTT is problematic for interoperability. If all participants in the network are developed and controlled by the same entity, this might not be a problem. But if actors from different companies are to cooperate on the same network, interoperability becomes a big problem.

Since payloads are binary, there is no standardized way of knowing what type of content it contains, or how it is encoded. Each recipient must try as best it can. This may open a wide array of vulnerabilities, related to quality assurance, possibility of injection, resilience, localization, and so on. Traditionally, this problem has been solved on the Internet by providing some form of Content Type. This is missing ...