Introducing the QEST broker: Scaling the IoT by bridging MQTT and REST

Abstract

In the “Internet of Things” (IoT) vision the physical world blends with virtual one, while machine-to-machine interaction improve our daily life. Clearly, how these virtual objects are exposed to us is critical, so that their user interface must be designed to support the easiness of usage that is driven by the users' needs, which is different from what machines requires. These two requirements must be solved, and an integrated solution should emerge, if we want to bring the IoT to the 50 billions network that is predicted to became in the next years. We believe that these requirements cannot be met by the same communication protocol, and so we propose a new kind of broker, named QEST that can bridge the two worlds, represented by their state-of-the-art protocols: MQTT and REST. In this paper, we demonstrate that our approach allows rapid development of user-facing IoT systems, while grating machines all the performance they need.