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Sniffer + Wireshark Throughput

Long time reader first time poster upper.

I am working on a very minimal BLE send / receive scheme for a research project, and am not using a SoftDevice. I have written my own driver to send a packet, and am monitoring the packets being sent through a BLE sniffer connected to windows 8 and wireshark. I am experiencing a phenomena I cant quite figure out. Here goes:

I am sending an advertising packet on channel 37 every 8.875 m/s.

The packet has a 1 byte counter in it that I am monitoring.

My time between wireshark packets received is .187896s

Thus, I am missing around 20-21 tx'ed packets between received packets in wireshark.
The counter in the advertising data between packets received in wireshark increments around 20-21 as well.

I have a GPIO pin toggling every time a packet is sent which I am monitoring on the scope, so I fairly sure that the hardware is sending out a packet every 8.875 ms. Thus, I am guessing this is a sniffer / wireshark issue.

Any ideas of why I would be have this throughput issue?

If its a sniffer issue, can anyone recommend a pro BLE packet sniffer? (I need to monitor raw network packets and am doing my own post processing).

Thank you in advance.

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  • I dont think you are likely to receive every packet.

    AFIK, Bluetooth frequency hops, and although your transmitter is set always receive on the same frequency, the sniffer is running generic firmware which will somehow need to listen on all available channels.

    I suspect the sniffer is not on listening on the same channel ( or band of channels) for some of your transmissions.

    Unfortunately I dont think the source code to the sniffer has been published ( though I could be wrong), so its hard to know precisely how the sniffer operates

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  • I dont think you are likely to receive every packet.

    AFIK, Bluetooth frequency hops, and although your transmitter is set always receive on the same frequency, the sniffer is running generic firmware which will somehow need to listen on all available channels.

    I suspect the sniffer is not on listening on the same channel ( or band of channels) for some of your transmissions.

    Unfortunately I dont think the source code to the sniffer has been published ( though I could be wrong), so its hard to know precisely how the sniffer operates

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