Another than pausing? Or pausing differently, i.e. not simply sleeping? There could be some logic in place to check whether the controller is back up again before trying to establish a new connection. IMO, though, this should be done by the ModelControllerClient impl.
Or have a notification for when the controller is ready to accept connections again.
In the CLI the pausing interval (if this is the way after all) could be exposed through the config, of course.