Mitigating Network Impact

Overview

The Mapped Universal Gateway (UG-AGENT) was designed from the ground up to be a good network citizen. It achieves this by:

• Maintaining a local state tracking database of discovered devices, points and their property values. This allows UG-AGENT to:
  • Only send deltas (changes) to the cloud, minimizing network load
  • Recover quickly from upgrades and failure conditions like a network / power outage without requiring a full scan
• Passively observing broadcasts on the network, minimizing the need for active interrogation. For example, when a new BACnet device comes online, it will send an I-Am packet on the network. UG-AGENT sees this message on the network and stores it in its tracking database.
• Subscribing to Change of Value Notifications (COV) or protocol equivalents when available. This allows field controllers to control the pace of network traffic (pub/sub instead of polling)
• Configurable polling intervals. By default, UG-AGENT polls for new data once per minute. This is easily configurable - for customers with sensitive networks, the polling interval can be set to 15 minutes
• Efficient Reads. Even for a large building with 100k+ points, the load on the network is quite minimal. Only a subset of the properties are read per device and UG-AGENT uses ReadProperty-Multiple or protocol equivalent when supported by the device / controller.

Avoiding Excessive Load

• The Mapped gateway is configured in read-only mode by default. In this mode, UG-AGENT will never write any properties to the network. In most cases, IP controllers rarely have any load related concerns. Issues are more common using serial communication, where throughput can be impacted by the distance between devices as well as bottlenecks created by the addition of controls from system expansion.
• The Mapped gateway is either a small hardware gateway, or software running in a container or virtual machine. If it is ever suspected that Mapped is the source of an issue, the gateway can be unplugged or the software safely shut down, allowing time for further investigation.

Lab Testing

• In order to test every update to UG-AGENT, Mapped maintains a lab with over 300 endpoints: devices, controllers, and BMS systems. We perform end to end testing in this lab before every software release, in order to ensure any possible network impact is identified and resolved prior to installation in a customer network.