IBM announced it is joining with Italy-based hardware architecture firm Eurotech in donating a complete draft protocol for asynchronous inter-device communication to the Eclipse Foundation, ReadWriteWeb reports.

A projected 24 billion simultaneous devices — sending billions of messages per hour —  including RFID tags on shipping crates, heart rate monitors, GPS devices, smartphone firmware, automobile maintenance systems, and even earrings may become more socially active than any teenager presently alive by the year 2020.

The new asynchronous inter-device communication protocol is called Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), the machine-to-machine counterpart of HTTP (used on websites).