What are some creative alternatives to polling? Having each gateway poll at some high frequency, just to get a low average latency for any device which might need updating, is very wasteful.

This system is proposed however because it is completely plug and play, as no router configuration, port forwarding, static IP addresses, etc. are required as long as the gateway always acts as a client, never a server.

Read more

Estimating the Exaflood has some good information about network traffic and the future of the internet. Distributed Embedded Systems In The Context of Genie has a lot of interesting information about the distant future of the internet. Genie is a workspace to explore fundamental redesign of the internet itself. Dovetails nicely with global embedded devices, and IPv6. Secure end points will allow the elimination of routers and LANs.

This will be a great thing for the aiosphere. How will this work? More importantly, when? Long time, I’m sure. UNtil then, are there greener alternatives to rapid polling?

My understanding of Ethernet is still pretty hazy, but I did learn that a TCP packet is 20-50 bytes (typ closer to 20). So a “got data?” query, and a “no” ack, could be a total of about 50 bytes. This reduces my initial rough bw calcs by more than order of magnitude.

I have been trying to think of a simple, unversal mechanism for async data push from a driver to a device, but can’t so far find anything as simple as periodic polling of the server, from the device side. Read more

To avoid the customer having to get a fixed IP address (or having to build a dynamic IP update client into the gateway), configure their router to give a fixed IP address to the gateway, and to forward a port to the gateway: we could have all data exchanged by periodic requests from the gateway. “Got anything for me?” or “Here’s what I’ve got” every X seconds, minutes, etc. Read more