Mesh proxy & Nus service performance

[huybk213]

Dear all,

I have a plan to use NUS service alongside with proxy Mesh.
I tried to find documents about mesh performance with Nus service?

Could you please give me more information? How can i optimize Mesh performance while ble service is running?

Thank you.

[tesc]

Hi,

Time spent for the NUS service, that is connection events and time used advertising or scanning for setting up the connection, is time that the Bluetooth mesh stack cannot use in RX mode listening for mesh packets. Therefore you should make sure to select parameters for advertising (or scanning), and connection parameters, that uses as little time as possible for those tasks, in order to give as much time as possible to the mesh stack.

In order to communicate with a node with concurrent NUS service, you may need to tweak the configuration of other nodes when it comes to repeat counts for relayed and originating packets. This depends on what portion of the total time is spent for NUS related operation, and what portion of the time the Bluetooth mesh stack can listen for mesh packets. Percentage of packets received is proportional to percentage of time used by mesh stack for RX, and repeating packets is the main mechanism in Bluetooth mesh for increasing reliability of transmissions.

Regards,
Terje

[huybk213]

Dear Tesc,

I only want to use NUS service for application configuration service (not mesh configuration), and will use default proxy feature in Mesh SDK.
Device will start advertising with default name "nRF Switch...".
Sometime other BLE Central device such as mobile phone, will connect to Mesh proxy node, discovery NUS service, transfer information. After everything done, BLE central will disconnect to proxy node.

So if i understand correctly, mesh performance will be reduced only when Mesh proxy and BLE central keep connection.
And In total life time of device, with no BLE device connect to Mesh proxy node.
Mesh network will reach the maximum performance.

Am i right?

Thank you Tesc.

[Simonr]

Hi

Sorry about the delayed reply, but Terje is on vacation, and we're just now getting to the backlog, as the summer vacation period has left us low on staff.

How will your Mesh proxy node know when to start advertising as a NUS peripheral instead of acting as a Mesh node? A BLE central won't be able to connect to the proxy node unless it advertises as a (regular) BLE peripheral. A suggestion would be to have a button on the device that you can press when you'd like to connect to it using a BLE central.

If you don't want to interact with it like that, you would have to have a timer that makes the device stop acting as a Mesh proxy node every now and then to advertise for the BLE central. I think this was Terje's concern in his last reply, as this would take away from the time the Mesh node was operative, and therefore compromise the Mesh functionality.

Best regards,

Simon