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.

Are there any simple ways to reduce the bandwidth of such a system? How about having devices, not the gateway, poll directly? And setting different polling frequencies for each device? No, this doesn’t make sense either. Different devices could, though, drive the polling frequency. Their bw requirements could be set on the site, which would then push a refresh rate to the gateway.

Is there some randomness that might work to generate good latency with lower bandwidth? I guess that a random retry interval could result in low latency sometimes, high latency others. Don’t know what the math looks like for such an idea, should ask YC.

From 4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design:

“Although the reflector must be polled by the user (as required by current RSS standards), this polling traffic is far less than requiring users to poll many thousands of source feeds. Also, it is possible to replace or augment the reflector with push-based notification mechanisms using email, instant messaging, or SMS; we leave this to future work.”

Email isn’t really push, it only moves the polling burden to the mail server. SMS is truly push, but there isn’t a mechanism for Ethernet. And even if there were, it would face the same router issues. Still searching for some hard dat, but suspecting that the bandwidth we are talking about is minute compared to contemporary uses: file sharing, streaming audio and video, online gaming, etc.