OK, I know there are lots of EEs/network-savvy people here. I need a recognizable term for a data packet sent at (very short) regular intervals from a device to a network that lets the network know both where the device is and its battery status.
My company has been calling it a heartbeat, but the medical providers using our products don’t like this term since it’s too easy to confuse with a patient’s status. (One does not want a maintenance tech saying “I can’t find a heartbeat” when referring to a patient tag.)
I have suggested that we use the industry-recognized term of “keepalive signal”, but they don’t like that either because, again, used in medical facilities.
Do any of you know of other common ways of referring to this sort of signal that can’t be confused with medical terminology? Need answer kinda fast.
Heartbeat is the correct industry term for a message like that, so I think if that’s not appropriate, it’s going to be necessary to invent an alternative, and to understand that it’s going to need explaining to anyone else outside of this context.
Ping is more related to an outgoing query and its reponse - it sounds like the OP is talking about a message that appears, unbidden, from the remote device, confirming (without being asked) that it is functioning
This sounds like a good candidate to me. It has precedent in network technology.
Of course that is also a downside – when someone talks about pinging the server, do the mean the standard ICMP ping packet, or one of the Application’s diagnostic pings?
It sounds like they need something to call out when they don’t get good news, and “we didn’t get a ping from that server lately” is pretty close. Awkwardly, any standard-use term for “we see that that server is [sick/dying/dead/stupid]” isn’t going to be acceptable, even though they’re usually pretty accurate and generally understood by everybody involved.
‘token’ (by extension of the token in a token ring network, which admittedly doesn’t exactly have this meaning, but is something you’d see pass regularly)
“Ping” was my first thought. Admittedly it is usually used in the opposite sense of checking whether the other end is there, but it is a pretty universally understood term, and would not be out of place. (Not unless the medical company are Monty Python fans, and don’t want it to be confused with the machine that goes ping*.)
Some systems will return a “pong” when “pinged.”
The description isn’t of a heartbeat or a token.
When you say “sent to the network” it isn’t clear what it meant. Is it a broadcast packet, or do you mean sent to a central server via the network? Indeed, what sort of network? When you say location as well as battery, that suggests it is mobile.
Asynchronous Device Status.
ADStat?
*You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.