client maximum report rate limit

ke5stl5 years ago

hey there.

One thing that I see would be very helpful, but which seems to be missing is:

a setting on the client that will work to limit the rate of position reports when the distance setting is triggered repeatedly within x amount of time.

the point of this is to save the client from reporting too frequently when travelling fast enough with a low-ish 'distance' value that the device essentially gets into a situation where it's reporting continuously.

if the main purpose is tracking people that are on pushbikes, and they're moving at 10 mph, then a distance that's good for that might be somewhat small, but, if they go and jump in a car, now they're travelling much faster, causing the device to trigger to report it's position much more frequently. ie: at a rate that really doesn't give any benefit in a lot of cases, if the distance is set to a relatively low number.

it would be great if there was a 'limiter' value possible to be put in which limits the number of position reports over x amount of time.

or, think of it from another angle, the speed at which, travelling faster than, does not increase the report rate.

this would allow good level of position reports for slow movements, while not over-doing it when the speed would otherwise indicate that way more position reports should be produced.

both settings (max speed and max reports per period of time) would both have their uses.

eg: someone that has a low angle-trigger, and is moving around in a small distance, but frequently changing direction, would also benefit from limiting the max report rate.

best regards, and keep up the good work!

Anton Tananaev5 years ago

You can do limiting on the server side.

ke5stl5 years ago

yeah, ok, true, but, the client is burning data and battery in that case.

part of the reason for doing this on the client is to help not burn through so much battery by not having them transmit data that's just going to be tossed.

another related thing that would be good to be able to do: tell the client to discard undelivered position reports.

if the device goes into an area where the cellular coverage is not good, it would be good to have the option of the device not storing up the undelivered position reports.

Anton Tananaev5 years ago

Data usage is pretty minimal and network battery usage is negligible comparing to GPS battery usage, which would have to be on all the time anyway.

ke5stl5 years ago

not sure if the data presented here agrees with your assertion:

https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1877050916317756/1-s2.0-S1877050916317756-main.pdf?_tid=915f981f-bdb5-4f26-81a6-e2ebee7593b3&acdnat=1533934938_7dfbeaf54ab5459c69acb86692665cd9

it contains this line:

It can be noticed that in both phones the 3G unit consumed approximately three times the power consumed by the
GPS unit.

I typically ask people to disable wi-fi, mostly so that the accuracy of position reports is not compromised (even with accuracy set to 'high'), but it also has benefits in terms of reducing another cause of battery drain.

to me, this means that limiting the transmission of position reports will help extend run-time of devices.

what say you?

Anton Tananaev5 years ago

They are comparing typical usage where data is ON all the time and GPS is almost never ON. GPS module, when ON, consumes much more power than network connection.