MQTT Industrial IoT Gateway

SmartConnect IIoT is an MQTT industrial IoT gateway. It collects machine data from CNC machines, PLCs and controllers and publishes it over MQTT to edge and cloud IIoT applications.

What is MQTT?

MQTT is a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol widely used in IoT and industrial IoT. Publishers send messages to topics on a broker, and any number of subscribers receive them. Its small overhead and efficient design make it well suited to sending machine data to edge and cloud systems, including over constrained or higher-latency networks.

MQTT for industrial IoT

• Lightweight publish/subscribe that scales to many data points.
• Decouples machines from consumers through a broker.
• Efficient on low-bandwidth or unreliable connections.
• A common ingest path for edge and cloud IIoT platforms.
• Flexible topic structures for organising machine data.

Publishing machine data over MQTT

SmartConnect collects machine data from the shop floor and publishes it to an MQTT broker. From there, edge services, dashboards, historians and cloud platforms subscribe to the data they need — without connecting directly to the machines.

Machines	CNC machines, PLCs and controllers
SmartConnect	Collects machine data and publishes to MQTT
Broker	Your MQTT broker (edge or cloud)
Subscribers	IIoT platforms, dashboards, analytics, cloud

Edge and cloud connectivity

Because SmartConnect runs at the edge, it can collect and buffer machine data close to the equipment and publish it over MQTT to the cloud. This suits low-bandwidth environments and distributed sites where a direct connection from each machine to the cloud is impractical.

MQTT alongside OPC UA and MTConnect

MQTT is one of three ways SmartConnect delivers data. For on-premises industrial integration, OPC UA and MTConnect are often used; for IIoT and cloud, MQTT is common. SmartConnect can provide the same collected machine data through the interface each application expects.