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  • Case ID: 288914
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Publishing MQTT messages from Thread device using NCS

Tristen

I have a system that consists of a sensor (nRF52840), hub (nRF5340), and gateway (nRF9160). The high level end goal is to be able to publish a MQTT message from the sensor, and have it travel to a device that can forward it a the cellular network. One concept was to the publish the MQTT message from the sensor, route the data to the hub via OpenThread, and from there route the data to the gateway via PPP. The gateway will then be responsible for sending the data over the cellular network to the MQTT broker. Is this possible? I have been hard pressed to find examples or documentation to support this. A good start would have been a MQTT over Thread demo for NCS which does not exist. 

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    Hi Tristen

    Thread devices are able to communicate with the internet if a Border Router is connected to the network. I would say that this is the build-in/intended/cleanest way to send data from a Thread network over the internet.
    However, the official OpenThread Border Router (OTBR) is for the Raspberry Pi.
    Maybe you can find some LTE-based OTBR designs if you look around on the internet.
    Another solution to this is to use the Raspberry Pi OTBR, and have a LTE adapter for the Raspberry pi.
    These solutions would likely require the hub to be connected to a permanent power source. But Thread routers must always be on and listen/forward, so they usually need to be connected to permanent power sources anyhow.

    We have no Thread solutions for MQTT, since it is build on TCP.
    While it is possible to get MQTT working for Thread on our devices, it is not officialy supported yet.

    However, the TCP protocol use more data and power than UDP.
    The CoAP application layer is built on UDP, and is therefore more commonly used for Thread networks, and is why we have samples for this.
    In this sense, I would recommend that you use CoAP instead of MQTT, as these two protocols are usually able to solve the same use-cases.

    I likely have more suggestions and comments to your case, but I will leave it with this for now.
    Did my thoughts on the matter make sense to you?
    Let me know if you have more questions

    Regards,
    Sigurd Hellesvik

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  • 0

    Hi Tristen

    Thread devices are able to communicate with the internet if a Border Router is connected to the network. I would say that this is the build-in/intended/cleanest way to send data from a Thread network over the internet.
    However, the official OpenThread Border Router (OTBR) is for the Raspberry Pi.
    Maybe you can find some LTE-based OTBR designs if you look around on the internet.
    Another solution to this is to use the Raspberry Pi OTBR, and have a LTE adapter for the Raspberry pi.
    These solutions would likely require the hub to be connected to a permanent power source. But Thread routers must always be on and listen/forward, so they usually need to be connected to permanent power sources anyhow.

    We have no Thread solutions for MQTT, since it is build on TCP.
    While it is possible to get MQTT working for Thread on our devices, it is not officialy supported yet.

    However, the TCP protocol use more data and power than UDP.
    The CoAP application layer is built on UDP, and is therefore more commonly used for Thread networks, and is why we have samples for this.
    In this sense, I would recommend that you use CoAP instead of MQTT, as these two protocols are usually able to solve the same use-cases.

    I likely have more suggestions and comments to your case, but I will leave it with this for now.
    Did my thoughts on the matter make sense to you?
    Let me know if you have more questions

    Regards,
    Sigurd Hellesvik

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