How to disable acknowledge request of ieee 802.15.4 when using zigbee?

[HchFW]

Hello. I'm testing zigbee with 'nrf5_sdk_for_thread_and_zigbee_v4.2.0_af27f76' sdk on nrf52833. I use the light control example and catch the wireless communication packet via dongle and wireshark. I can see that the acknowledge request is active on IEEE 802.15.4 layer. How can I disable this ack so as to reduce communication interval time between two packets?

P.S I have already disable aps layer's response.

zigbee_log1.pcapng

[Amanda Hsieh]

Hi, 

The team doesn't think there is a possibility for that in the specification. MAC layer acknowledgements are minimum to ensure reliable network operation, making sure that the packet was at least delivered to the other node.

What are you trying to achieve there? Is this about throughput/latency?

Regards,
Amanda H.

[HchFW]

Yes, I wish to send messages at a high frequency, such as 200 packets per second or higher. Is It possible to reduce the packet's length or directly imporve the zigbee speed from 250kbps to 1Mbps or 500kbps? Or is there any other way to achive such a high communication frequency?

[Amanda Hsieh]

Zigbee was designed to have throughput up to 250 kbps, maybe you should switch to a protocol that better suits the requirements. Or you could send data more efficiently (assuming that they want to transfer a bulk of data to minimize layer headers overhead) but this is still limited to the theoretical 250 kbps.

-Amanda H.

[HchFW]

I have tested other protocol such as BLE and Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB). Throughput of BLE can satisfy our case. But it can miss some message package while there are many other bluethooth devices. ESB can have a high communication frequency but its connection stability is not tested. Have you tested ESB in a complex communication environment? And how can I capture the wireless communication package of ESB?

Thanks.

[Amanda Hsieh]

Hi, 

HchFW said:

Have you tested ESB in a complex communication environment?

What do you mean by the "complex communication environment"? Could you elaborate in more detail?

Check out the Enhanced ShockBurst: Transmitter/Receiver sample. 

HchFW said:

how can I capture the wireless communication package of ESB?

My colleague made https://github.com/too1/nrf52-esb-sniffer 

-Amanda H.

[HchFW]

"Complex communication environment" means that there are many devices communicating with each other via ble, zigbee or wifi and all the channels of 2.4G have a heavy wireless message transmission. Will ESB still have a reliable and stable connection in such condition? 

Thanks.

[Amanda Hsieh]

Hi, 

ESB doesn't have any mechanism for frequency agility/jumping, all this is left for the application to handle. So if you run ESB in a simple scenario where you only stick to a single frequency, then you are more susceptible to interference compared to BLE for instance. but if you add some mechanism on top of ESB to handle this then it should be just as good.

-Amanda H.