A blog by Devendra Tewari
RabbitMQ’s AMQP 1.0 plugin can be used by applications to communicate with devices that use the MQTT 3.1.1 protocol. You need to use the appropriate AMQP 1.0 link address so that RabbitMQ is able to route the messages through the amq.topic exchange used for the MQTT protocol.
An AMQP sender can send a message to an MQTT topic such as 1/temperature using address /topic/1.temperature and subject 1.temperature. The /topic/ prefix indicates that the amq.topic exchange is used. That exchange routes a message to all the linked AMQP receivers. The default AMQP exchange routes a message to linked receivers in a round robin fashion, so only one receiver picks up the message for processing.
An AMQP receiver can receive message sent to an MQTT topic such as +/temperature using address /topic/*.temperature. The multi-level wildcard symbol # may also be used. A receiver can receive all messages sent to the amq.topic exchange using address /topic/#.
An MQTT client can publish a message to a topic with retain flag set, and MQTT clients that are currently offline can receive the message when they subscribe to the topic later—as long as the subscription topic does not contain wildcards, thus subscribing to # topic, for example, will not deliver retained messages. Other brokers such as Mosquitto don’t have this limitation.
RabbitMQ does not allow AMQP 1.0 sender to send message with retain flag set. Messages sent by MQTT client with retain flag set are also not received by AMQP 1.0 receivers that are currently offline.