MQTT is a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol that is well suited for IoT applications due to its low bandwidth and battery usage, ability to publish messages to topics that many devices can subscribe to, and support for different quality of service levels to ensure reliable delivery. It works by having clients publish messages to topics that other clients subscribe to through a broker, with topics acting as channels for messages and brokers handling message routing and storage. MQTT has gained popularity for IoT due to its simplicity, low memory footprint, and ability to handle intermittent connectivity.