RE: Advertising interval value keep fluctuating

user8164 — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 11:46:04 GMT

Hi,

Since you refer to the file mesh_adv.c, I assume you are working with the nRF5 SDK for Mesh, and I assume the latest release which is v5.0.0.

Advertisements are used for several purposes. One of them is for sending Bluetooth mesh packets, which will happen as needed and within a restriction of maximum 100 messages sent within a sliding 10 second window. Therefore, if you push throughput (sending) from a node, you could experience a burst of packets, then a pause since you have sent 100 messages and you must wait until there has been 10 seconds since the first packet and then you will can get a burst again. Could the issue you describe (9 second interval) be related to that? I.e. how many messages are you sending from your node, and with what interval?

Our Bluetooth stack (the SoftDevice) schedules all activity, including advertisements, scanning, connections, etc. according to certain rules, see SoftDevice timing-activities and priorities. If too much activity is scheduled, then some of the desired timings for those activities will collide. When collisions occur, one activity is schedule while any other activities are not. By decreasing the advertising interval for one advertising activity, the chances are it collides with other activity. The Bluetooth mesh stack and the Bluetooth mesh examples are tuned to get good overall performance, and changing interval values may end up giving more collisions, which could make performance worse.

Further, the particular advertising setting that you change may be related to a different advertising system than the one you are looking at.

What kind of advertising are you looking at, is it the ADV bearer mesh packets, is it advertising as GATT proxy node, or is it concurrent BLE activity?

How do you measure the long interval, do you have a sniffer trace?

Regards,
Terje