Data consumption comparison between PF and Gateway bridge

Hi there :wave:
We are using a 4G backhaul for our gateways and we are trying to limit the data consumption.
From your experience, which scheme is the most efficient in this case:

  1. With the gateway bridge installed on the server (and therefore with UDP connection between the gateway and the server)
  2. With the gateway bridge installed on the gateway (and therefore with MQTTS connection between the gateway and the server)

There is some MQTT keepalive overhead to be considered for cellular backhaul, but for every company I’ve worked with, sending unencrypted anything across the internet is a complete non-starter (assuming Semtech, since you referenced UDP).

We had some luck tuning the gateway stats interval (15 min for one use case) and the MQTT keepalive interval on the gateway bridge.

Data is encrypted from the node to the NS, so we can’t really say this is unencrypted ?

But yes, the spoofing risk exists with Semtech Packet forwarder, even if this could be mitigated by using a VPN.

Thanks for the input regarding the keepalive interval anyway! I will do my own tests to see what is best, but I’m still interested to have feedbacks on that.

Gateway stats payloads are not encrypted. Gateway wrappers around the device data are not encrypted (again, assuming Semtech UDP). I doubt people are ignoring or throwing away this data, given all the questions I see about using the web UI on this forum.

It’s almost 2023, don’t do plaintext across the Internet! :joy:

Ok. Thank you for your valuable input.

At the moment, we are using a VPN, but no matter, I really didn’t want to debate about security.

I would love to hear other folks about data volumes.