Duty cycle modulation design/mechanics?

[qzhang]

We have been looking at duty cycle modulation (available in Edge SDKs) as a way to conserve resources (energy/power/battery life, bandwidth, etc.) on an edge device. However, it seems that the way the off-period of the duty cycle is implemented is to simply disconnect the communication endpoint from the server, and reconnect at the start of a new duty cycle (at least in the Java Edge SDK).

Is this design intended? We would like if during the off-period, the client would still be able to receive some sort of keep-alive/force-connect message from the ThingWorx platform. I know that the client​ is able to initiate such connections by setting forceConnect to true when calling invokeService, but is there a similar mechanism available for the platform?

[supandey · Accepted solution]

Qiqiang, i believe this is working to spec I'm not aware of any other option which you have to keep the modulation cycle and still get some sort of communication out. May be someone here already tried this.

Anyhow doing regular ping/pongs in off cycle mode will also require some amount of resources, isn't it contradicting the requirement of your use case to conserve resources?

[qzhang]

It does a bit, but we were thinking that somehow we can lower our resource consumption while still getting responsiveness. Thank you for the reply!