One of the technologies that we have been working with is the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol which is a lightweight protocol designed by IBM for robust messaging over slow networks. It enables devices to publish and subscribe to a message broker server. The message broker server application can be made to perform computations on incoming data and return the resulting data or instructions, because of this it is possible for many small and distributed devices to send and receive data.

The easiest way to make use of this protocol is to use Really Small Message Broker (RSMB) which was also developed by IBM. RSMB as its name suggests provides the minimum functionality for a MQTT message  broker, allowing devices to publish and subscribe to it without any internal manipulation of the data. We were also demonstrated how to use various Java libraries to make our own message broker, allowing us to do these manipulations.