openthread Data forwarding and receiving

[caidehen]

One feature I want to implement now is: I have five 52833dk development boards. I want to use one of them to send a packet of data based on ip address protocol. The packet of data can be forwarded by thread network and finally can be received on the computer or mobile phone What should I do? Is there an example of something like that that I don't know how to do anymore?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

The Thread network uses IPv6 addressing to send and route packets through the network. By specifying the address of the receiver, the Full Thread Devices (FTD) configured as routers will forward any IPv6 packets to the destination. If you want the packet to be transferred from the Thread network to a PC or a phone, you will need a border router, as phones and PCs normally does not support Thread/IEEE 802.15.4 network interfaces.

You can have a look at the Thread samples to get started. The CLI example is great to setup a simple test-network to with routers and end nodes. You can also use the CLI example to send UDP or CoAP packets.

Best regards,
Jørgen

[caidehen]

Can you tell me how thread transfers data to a pc or phone? I do not know how to configure now, please guide me   I now have a border route configured but I don't know how to communicate with my phone or my computer configuration

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

The Thread protocol does not specify any application layers. You can send UDP packets from the Thread node, but you need to configure the phone/PC to receive such packets. All you need on the Thread device is the IP address of the destination where you want to send the packets. Depending on how your network is configured, this can either be a global IPv6 address, or a IP6 translated version of a IPv4 address if you have NAT64 configured. You can also setup a CoAP server on the phone/PC and send packets from the CoAP client sample, but we do not have any examples of this setup.

[caidehen]

According to you, this is just a theoretical realization but it doesn't happen in practice, right?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Not sure what you mean by "theoretical realization". It is possible to implement this in practice, but we do not have any examples showing how to send packets to PC/phone. The closest will be the Cloud examples that sends messages from the Thread devices to a cloud service:

• Thread thethings.iO Cloud CoAP Client Example
• Thread Google Cloud Platform CoAP Example

The principle is the exact same, just different address of the receiver, and you need to configure the receiver side (PC/phone) differently.