How does IOT controller servers reach into your home NW?

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Scenario: Typical home NW with IOT lamp switches. Now from external location you turn on the lights maybe using Alexa. How does the 'not established' session from a server in China make it through the router to the internal LAN IOT device?
Are the IOT devices sending pings(?} every second of every minute to their controller servers?

@forrest-stivers-ii said in How does IOT controller servers reach into your home NW?:

Scenario: Typical home NW with IOT lamp switches. Now from external location you turn on the lights maybe using Alexa. How does the 'not established' session from a server in China make it through the router to the internal LAN IOT device?
Are the IOT devices sending pings(?} every second of every minute to their controller servers?

Monitoring AWS IoT Connections would get a bit much on any network better yet just a home network if this were to happen as you've described.

AWS has an IoT message broker that is built into AWS IoT Core. The reason for this is prevent false positives when devices may just drop a ping every once in while. This broker can tell the difference between an administrative disconnect and a "hiccup."

When an IoT device connects or disconnects from the IoT message broker. So for example, when you put a device into service. it probably connects to it. It is now aware of a device being connected. Only if a device disconnects, will it send out a message that it's not there...the broker has to distinguish is this the hiccup I mentioned or administrative. So instead of sending a heartbeat like that. It kinda says, I know you were connected and should work....so commands can be sent if the broker sees the connection it registered and has not received a disconnect.

I hope that makes sense.