Some questions about asset_tracker_v2, agps, aws and nrfcloud

[Aleksa]

Hello,

I use nrf9160dk, ncs v1.6.1.

I'm trying to use both AWS IoT to store some data from the DK board, and to connect to nrfcloud for AGPS data. I don't have any previous experience with the asset tracker sadly. 

So I've spent some time getting familiar with it, but I have some stuff that are unclear to me, and it would be great to get these things confirmed:

1. Best way to use both AWS services and nrfcloud for AGPS, is to use AWS as a proxy towards nrfcloud (does this long document serves for that?) 
2. Asset tracker is capable of doing both of these things too?
3. Is the reason why we use AWS as a proxy because nrfcloud can provide ephemeric and almanac data, and the AWS can't. And, we have a great API to use in order to process this data, when it comes from the nrfcloud?
4. Do you know of a simpler way to achieve what I'm after? Eg. could I do the following: 
                                                                                              a) connect to nrfcloud
                                                                                              b) get agps data => disconnect
                                                                                              c) connect to aws
                                                                                              d) publish the data, parse answers => disconnect

Currently I have a weird bug with the iBasis sim card, which worked for me until fairly recently. So I can't test this approach.

I'm not too familiar with these topics (especially not the cloud proxy part), so I would really appreciate it if you could help me out here.

Thanks,

Aleksa

[Markus Tacker (he/him)]

Hei Aleksa,

Aleksa said:

1. Best way to use both AWS services and nrfcloud for AGPS, is to use AWS as a proxy towards nrfcloud (does this long document serves for that?) 

Yes, the nRF Asset Tracker for AWS provides an example of how to integrate the nRF Cloud A-GPS and P-GPS Location services, when building your own cloud solution. It implements nRF Cloud's REST API to resolve the A-GPS and P-GPS of devices and send the data to the devices using the same MQTT connection. You might find this code-walkthrough interesting, which explains how the A-GPS resolution is implemented in nRF Asset Tracker for AWS.

Aleksa said:

3. Is the reason why we use AWS as a proxy because nrfcloud can provide ephemeric and almanac data, and the AWS can't. And, we have a great API to use in order to process this data, when it comes from the nrfcloud?

nRF Cloud Location Services are at the moment only served from nrfcloud.com.

The reason for using cloud-to-cloud integration of nRF Cloud Location services, for devices that do not connect directly to nRF Cloud is:

1. storage for TLS certificates is very limited on the device, and when adding additional credentials e.g. for mandatory device management services we have seen in the past that using two sets of certificates for the primary connection of the device is not always possible.
2. creating and maintaing two TLS connections at the same time is not possible (without adding a TLS client to the application), therefore the application needs to completely terminate one connection before initiating the second one. This creates a huge overhead because of the TLS handshake and incurs relatively large power costs. Since this problem can be solved on the cloud side (through cloud-to-cloud integration), there is no sensible reason to solve this on the device side.

[Aleksa]

Well this explains everything. 

Thank you very much Markus!