Network PDU relay problem

[ivangh24]

Hi all,

I am currently working on a personal project with hundreds of nodes. I have created a device with remote provisioning models (server and client). In my network, all nodes are relays and all nodes have remote provisioning servers. The more nodes i add to the network, the more problems i have to add new ones. Checking with nRF Mesh Sniffer app, i realized that the network starts to slow down and messages start to be lost. There comes a moment where the sniffer detects thousands of messages, so i guess that causes several failures in the remote provisioner. It seems to be a problem in the management of the messages or in the ram, surely i am configuring something wrong but i don't know what to do. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance, Ivan.

[nrf52840, latest SDK version]

[Elfving]

Hello Ivan,

That is an issue you can arrive at with a 'flooding type' Mesh, like what BLE Mesh is. At this point it is a good idea to try tuning some of the parameters in these nodes in order to avoid problems like network congestion. I would recommend you to go through the configurations mentioned here. This page (even though it is for the old Mesh SDK, that is an add-on for the nRF5 SDK) goes a bit further into the pros and cons of certain options, helping you weigh out the options and figure out what you need.

So there are multiple things you can do, but one thing that is easy to give as an example is that not every node necessarily needs to relay. If your sniffer captures that many messages, I assume the network isn't that wide physically, meaning that lots of nodes might cover the same area. This last part of this response by a coworker of mine goes also a bit into the structure you could aim for with a larger network.

Regards,

Elfving

[ivangh24]

Hi Elfving ,

Sorry for the delay, I was working on other projects. It was a 'flooding type' issue that was solved by disabling the relay parameter on some nodes. You have helped me a lot. Thank you very much for your help.

Kind regards,

Ivan

[Elfving]

No problem at all Ivan! :)

Please come back with more questions if there is anything else.

Regards, and happy new year,

Elfving