Sparkplug Now an Official ISO/IEC Standard

In a first for the sponsoring Eclipse Foundation, the Sparkplug 3.0 specification has been published as an International Standard. Sparkplug is an open software specification that enables mission-critical operational technology (OT) clients to use industry standards, including OASIS MQTT, to seamlessly integrate data from their applications, sensors, devices, and gateways with most Industrial IoT infrastructure. Sparkplug provides an open and freely available specification for how edge gateways or native MQTT-enabled end devices and MQTT Applications communicate bi-directionally within an MQTT Infrastructure. As a result, Sparkplug enables businesses to easily deploy complex, mission critical Industrial IoT systems.  

Going forward, the Sparkplug specification will also be known as ISO/IEC 20237. The Eclipse Foundation and its Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group retain stewardship of the specification and intend to submit future revisions through the IEC Joint Technical Committee (JTC 1) for information technology’s Publicly Available Specification (PAS) transposition process for reviewing and approving externally developed specifications. 

ISO/IEC International Standards are global benchmarks for businesses, manufacturers, vendors, and service providers regarding approved and validated safety features, quality measures, and interoperability. By becoming an ISO/IEC standard, a technology is effectively established as a globally recognized technical ecosystem and benefits from global acceptance of products, accelerated adoption, and expanded reach. 

The Sparkplug Working Group is simultaneously launching a product compatibility program for Sparkplug implementers. The program will ensure that Sparkplug-compatible products and implementations demonstrate a high degree of compatibility and interoperability. 

By design, the MQTT specification does not dictate a Topic Namespace or any payload encoding. However, as the Industrial IoT and other architectures leveraging the publisher/subscriber model are adopted in the industrial sector, having different Topic Namespace and payload encoding can inhibit interoperability for the end customer. 

To that end, the Sparkplug specification addresses the following components within an MQTT infrastructure: 

• Sparkplug defines an OT-centric Topic Namespace 

• Sparkplug defines an OT-centric Payload definition optimized for industrial process variables

• Sparkplug defines MQTT Session State management required by real-time OT SCADA systems

Further information on ARC’s coverage of industrial IoT edge hardware and software markets is available here.