Pub/Sub Communication in IoT: MQTT and Zigbee

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“Basic setup including HA integration with broker and devices ”

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Introduction
A few months ago, I participated in the Java User Group Day in Thorn (May 2024), where Mariusz Strzelecki delivered an inspiring talk on IoT and smart home technologies. This encouraged me to set up my own Home Assistant server as a personal IoT lab project.

Many of the devices in my setup utilize the Zigbee protocol and the lightweight MQTT publish/subscribe protocol. Zigbee is an energy-efficient protocol specifically designed for IoT sensors. Its smaller packet sizes, low power consumption, and mesh network topology make it an excellent choice for IoT, surpassing WiFi in these aspects.

On the other hand, MQTT follows the publish-subscribe (pub/sub) pattern, which facilitates loose coupling in the system. This architecture allows components to work independently, simplifies maintenance, and provides a standardized communication protocol. The MQTT broker manages topics, enabling sensors to publish data to specific topics while multiple clients can subscribe to them. Importantly, publishers and subscribers remain decoupled, unaware of each other's existence.

This approach resembles the classic Observer design pattern, but MQTT operates at the network level, enabling communication between numerous devices, not just within a single JVM. It reminds me of the deprecated Guava Event Bus library but scaled for distributed IoT environments. Furthermore, MQTT supports topic hierarchies and Quality of Service (QoS) levels, ensuring reliable message delivery even in unstable network conditions.

This project serves as an personal project for integrating IoT technologies, aiming to demonstrate the synergy between Zigbee and MQTT in a smart home environment.

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