Gracefully Shutdown IoT Devices

If power to a module is suddenly cut, from the perspective of the network, the MNO cannot differentiate whether the sudden lack of communication from the device is simply due to temporary signal loss such as interference, or due to the device being powered off.

Since temporary signal loss can be quite common, especially for mobile applications, cellular network infrastructure is designed to retain the connection information so that once a device is back within coverage, the connection can be resumed immediately without needing a complete reconnection procedure.

However, if a device is being powered off, there is no intention that the device will be resuming the connection and as a result the network will be needlessly maintaining the connection information and using up network resources.

Although the network will eventually remove the connection after a timeout, the network resources will remain blocked during this time.

Therefore, when a device is to be powered off, the application and indeed the device itself should be designed to allow the communications module to first disconnect from the network before completely powering off the module and other components.