We have a Win CE 6.0 device that is required to consume services that will be provided using WCF. We are attempting to reduce bandwidth usage as much as possible and with a simple test we have found that using UDP instead of HTTP saved significant data usage.
I understand there are limitations regarding WCF on .NET Compact Framework 3.5 devices and was curious what people thought would be the appropriate way forward. Would it make sense to develop a custom UDP binding, and would that work for both sides?
Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks.
While http does have some overhead, if this is becoming a significant part of your data usage, then I would suspect that your API is too “chatty”, and maybe fewer messages (each carrying more payload) should be considered.
The next point would be; how can we reduce the bandwidth for a given amount of payload? Compression is an option, but can be a problem on some platforms. Another is to use a serialization format that is inherently dense and efficient to process (in terms of CPU cycles, since you are using low-power devices). For that purpose, something like “protocol buffers” would be ideal.
protobuf-net is a CF-compatible implementation of protocol buffers for .NET; the CF build doesn’t have all the nice WCF features (because CF doesn’t support them), but it can work very effectively.
Additionally, if you do go http, then MTOM should be considered, as this reduces the encoding overhead of binary data (i.e. what protobuf-net would use).
Moving to UDP can be an option, but I would try something like http + protobuf-net + MTOM first (combined with a less “chatty” API), and see how it stacks up.
I should also note that the current (downloadable) version of protobuf-net has some “kinks” with CF; it works, but it isn’t as fast etc as it could be (due to limitations in meta-programming on CF). The “v2” product (not yet released) addresses all these points, allowing fully static (and fast) execution on CF. And best of all, it is free.