[wildzzz]

Up to the minute sensor data for something so remote that it needs a satellite uplink is either going to be for something incredibly critical or totally overkill and a waste of money. With Swarm, you could be waiting up to 2 hours between passes that last anywhere between 10 and 50 minutes so it's not like you'll have your data instantly for large portions of the day.

[moralestapia]

Yes, but then IoT usually invokes a sense of (almost) real-time monitoring of things and lots of packets etc...

But I get your point, also you can always do a lot of things to save on bandwidth, like do not send info which is not interesting (i.e. no point in sending 100s of "no fire was detected" messages).

Btw, anyone here knows if there's compression schemes designed specifically for small data packets? Gzip and others would be overkill as headers vastly exceed payload size. Just using raw LZ77 may work but it's 2022 so there's probably a specific thing for that already.

Also, what about data that follows a specific format, like only integer numbers, it would be nice to have an algorithm that takes a "string" of 32-bit ints and gives you back a binary buffer with a smaller lossless representation of it.

[initplus]

This product is targeted at actual users of "IoT", think remote monitoring in remote locations. Not "smart microwave" style IoT.

Not sure there is any automatic solution for compression here. If you know your own use case you are in the best position to choose where to sacrifice accuracy with a lossy compression scheme. But this relies on understanding of the accuracy of the input data, possible ranges of values, importance of accuracy in different fields etc. Not sure how an automated algorithm could take these real world constraints into account.

A clever compression algo can't help you if you try compress 4 doubles, but in reality you only needed byte precision on some fixed 0-100% range.

[eternityforest]

Yeah and that's probably why IoT devs absolutely crank up the data rate and spew dozens of Bluetooth advertising packets in the air for no apparent reason, probably significantly reducing battery life that could have been 5yrs, for applications that really don't need instant response.

Something like msgpack might be able to compress ints to some degree since it can represent them as smaller data types.

[moralestapia]

Thank you for the msgpack reference.

[Grimburger]

> designed specifically for small data packets

Zstd dictionary mode? At small sizes using a dictionary is generally the way to go.