Managing Data Usage in the XBee Industrial Gateway

Typical data use-cases that involve a sensor with an XBee Industrial Gateway may be about 1-3 MB/month of data. If the actual usage ends up being closer to 10-15 MB a month this can be unexpected and may be due to the presence of EDP protocol keepalive messages (device-send, server-send). The EDP application keepalives (device-send/server-send – which are 60 and 75 second intervals by default) are mandatory. The TCP specification requires that intervals have to be between 5 - 65535 seconds (18 hours).

However, even if one disables the Digi Remote Manager connection and the keep-alives, as well as turns off the Python script they may still see use over 5 MB in a month. 

Recommendation:

To keep Digi Remote Manager data usage on an XBee Industrial Gateway/XBee Gateway low, there are two options:

• Tune in the device-send and server-send keepalives to be as long as possible without the carrier just killing the connection due to inactivity (in which case the gateway will need to re-establish the connection, which will use as much data as 50+ keepalives)
• Turn off the Digi Remote Manager connection entirely, and either bring it up on-demand when needed (if using the built-in APIs for uploading things like data points), or use web service APIs from Python.

We also make this same recommendation for Digi's XBee Cellular radios.