And even when outside of a geo-fenced area, a smart protocol could drastically limit the data usage. Like, just some quick thoughts applicable to most nodes:
- Do not send JSON, or not even ASCII, but encode your data into pure bytes. Like rather than using 10 characters for the minimal longitude value written as
-180.00000(or 9 when leaving out the decimal dot), use 4 bytes for a standard 32 bit float, or multiply by 1,00000 and send as a 32 bit long integer. - Do not use a precision that is higher than your use case needs, or the GPS offers (probably just 4 decimals, which would even fit in 3 bytes).
- Maybe one only needs part of the coordinates, assuming that the mobile app that shows the data is close to the pet that is being tracked?
- If it's about finding lost animals, to save both bandwidth and battery, and assuming LoRaWAN Class A devices are fully supported in TTN, but location is not: send a small "alive" packet quite often, and only if the application responds in some specific way, power the GPS (and some light and a buzzer?) and start sending coordinates more frequently.
- Only send (in short intervals) when the data has changed more than some threshold. (But send more often whenever the data changes, if only as that makes it easier to detect faulty sensors that emit readings that change a lot.)