Digital Lab for Basic and Advanced Features of Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)

Abstract

The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) application layer protocol is the de-facto first choice in building Internet of Things (IoT) systems and applications. Being a fundamental component in virtually all IoT projects, a wrong MQTT configuration or usage may lead to critical problems for both system owner and users. Driven by the need for further problem-driven MQTT training involving challenging IoT use cases, we propose Online-MQTT, an online lab course for MQTT. Online-MQTT is designed to be used by a wide range of learners while pinpointing to two crucial research gaps. We build on the unique Open DigiLab4U infrastructure to realize our scalable MQTT online lab. We first elaborate on our educational considerations such as the selection of topics, the target group, our didactic approach and finally technical challenges to accomplish an MQTT experiment with remote access to physical assets. Next, we detail the course content, by illustrating MQTT basic features and drawing the learning path towards demonstrating two current research gaps, i.e., enhancing MQTT with semantics and real-time capabilities. The main achievement is an online MQTT course that is expected to be of high interest for MQTT beginners, experts and researchers.