Constant stuttering through UDP

[Cilan]

I have a UDP k_work setup to send data in a ringbuffer whenever uart gets almost full. However, what I find is if the network has any amount of traffic on it other than my nrf7002, there is constant stuttering and loss of information (probably from stalling uart). This doesn't sound very much like UDP, which shouldn't care about network traffic I would think since it is not acknowledged. Is there something to check to resolve this, or can UDP sends be designated to the network core somehow?

[Marte Myrvold]

Hi,

Can you explain how you are seeing this stuttering? Are you seeing it on the nRF7002 side that the UDP data is not sent, or is it on the receiver side? Can you get a sniffer log of this to see if the packets were sent from the nRF7002 or not?

 If you are sending a lot of small packets, you might notice an impact when there are other devices on the network since the devices cannot transmit to the access point at the same time. Wi-Fi 6 introduced OFDMA, which improves this since the bandwidth can be divided into multiple resource units, but for this, you would need an access point that supports Wi-Fi 6 and OFDMA.

You might see an improvement by using TCP instead since you can send more data in each packet than you can with UDP.

Best regards,
Marte

[Cilan]

I'm seeing it on the receiver side. I'm not sure TCP is a good idea, because it is latency sensitive (need to get the data quick) and not every packet needs acknowledgement. I am sending many large packets I would say, but it is like barely 200Kbps throughput I'm trying to do. Also, I use UDP broadcast to let devices know I exist and to connect to me, which would not really be possible with TCP as far as I know.

[Cilan]

Verifying this as an answer to close. I will unclose if I need to revisit this issue, but for now I am working around it by forcing 5ghz.