I have 35 BSoM devices and currently 27 of them are deployed and running with my customers. I am experiencing much higher data usage on a few devices than expected. The setup is some custom made boards with the BSoM modules on them acting as a cellular gateway for some BLE beacons collecting temperature data. The BSoMs send the beacon data & its power status once every 15 mins to the cloud console and we then send that to our software. Even though the devices all have the same firmware, I have 2 devices that are using 12x the amount of data than the rest. For example, 25 devices (of the 27 active) are using ~0.05MB per day of data, where as the 2 "rogue" devices are using ~1.2MB per day. Same FW, same amount of beacons at each location, etc. Signal strength appears to be good (~76%), quality around 50% (maybe this is a bit low).
I would originally think there are a bunch of disconnects & cold handshakes causing the high data usage but I have devices with worse signal strength (as low as 19% & 29% quality) only using ~0.05MB per day. Due to this, I am blowing through my data allowance and I need to figure out what is wrong. I originally thought there was too much data being queued up from the beacons (because I had some dynamic features in my firmware) since there were 5 devices with this high usage problem, but I have since made FW updates to have the beacons queue the same amount for all devices and am now stuck at 2 devices with this high usage and I cannot seem to find anything that points me to why they would be using this much data.
Thank you @gusgonnet. There is definitely some interesting information in there. Does the GitHub repo with the tool work for the BSoM devices as well? I may try with a device I have on hand here. I did not look super close at it yet, but I assume it will not forward data onto the cloud server to see data on the software application end, correct? In this case, I will not be able to do much with deployed customer devices as they require the data consistently.
I have also requested the customer to help me out in getting info about the device install to ensure the devices aren't experiencing RF issues that could be causing this.
Still having problems with this consumption issue and I am having no luck. I have made multiple firmware revisions, and I still see the same devices with a high usage. Devices with the same firmware and sometimes even lower signal strength and quality are still performing better in terms of data usage. (0.05MB per day vs 1.2MB per day). I cannot use that tool to check problems on the devices as I cannot interrupt services for my customers and the devices I have in our lab do not produce the same issue. I have had the customers try to move the devices and get better signal strength, adjust their positioning in the current position, etc, with no luck. Any other ideas?
I understand how the RF can be affected, we design our own devices for other applications so I understand the difficulties with RF devices. However, this seems to be an entirely different issue. Especially with only a few of my devices experiencing issues while other devices are deployed in the same way. From other posts I have been reading it seems I am not the only one with this issue. Could be poor design on the BSoM modules, who knows