MQTT/AMQP design implications
If you're working with embedded devices or telematics solutions, you might be hearing noise about a fairly new protocol called MQTT . It's a relative newcomer to the network protocol world having been invented in 2009 and first published in the wild in 2010, it is roughly speaking to tcp based binary wire protocols what SPDY is to HTTP. At the heart of the protocol and why you might use it instead of say..AMQP is its simplicity. There are only 5 operations that must be implemented, it's wire format is minimal, and because of it's simplicity, it is theoretically able to use less power. A close examination of the differences between AMQP and MQTT show that the low power or low memory devices (think Arduino class) will certainly be more likely to easily speak MQTT rather than AMQP. As an example of how an ideal architecture leveraging the strengths of each protocol might look, take a look at the following diagram: When looking at this stack, let's talk abou...