During pdp registration or heartbeat processing, PAP looks for any policies in the associated subgroup. If the policyList as per group is not matching with list as per heartbeat, it will try to update the PDP by sending messages. But as the policy is not available in the db, PAP keeps on sending an empty list for policiesToBeDeployed, and PDP keeps on responding the same status (there is no failure response from PDP as PDP is working fine as per the message it is getting).