Thread network breakdown - possibly interference

[Michael Simpson]

Hi

I have my first Thread pilot site installed with 1 OTBR and RCP and 4 REEDs

Much of the time everything works fine but now and then my communications seem to break down and become intermittently offline at an application level with CoAP message timing out.

When I was having problems I ran "neighbor list" from ot-ctl and all my RSSIs were around -45 which looks ok to me?

I found my RCP was installed near a WIFI router and shifting it away just a few feet seem to fix my problem but it has come back.

Can you please advise steps to diagnose and remedy

I don't understand how channels work and what is best practice. Is there a description of this somewhere.

I set the Channel to 15 on my OTBR which forms the network.

I thought I read that Silabs Thread which I was using you set the channel to 0 and it would select the best channel. Is this correct.

This from my ot-ctl

> channel

15

Done

> channel preferred

0x7fff800

Done

> channel supported

0x7fff800

What is 0x7fff800? It looks like a mask?

[Gabe Kassel]

Others can advise how to use the channel manager/monitor features in OpenThread to intelligently choose your operating channel, but as a first pass I'd suggest this:

In the initial test environment, find the channel and width of the nearby wifi router (e.g. channel 1 20 MHz). Then choose a non-overlapping 15.4 channel (e.g. 25). See if you can reproduce the issue.

I believe channel 15 is in between wifi channels 1/6, however band edge emissions or 40 MHz operation can cause interference from wifi against that channel. I would try to test with a channel very far away from nearby wifi to confirm your hypothesis. 

0x7fff800 is indeed a mask. This is a helpful resource though others may have better ones. 

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[Michael Simpson]

Thanks Gabe

I tried "Reset"ing my OTBR and forming a new OTBR network with a channel of 23 but my REEDs could not connect.

When I set my OTBR channel back to 15, my REEDs connect again.

On my REEDs dataset I only set the Network Name and the Master Key, so I thought changing the channel on the OTBR would work ok

I these some procedure I have to do to clear the REED out?

What might I be missing?

[Gabe Kassel]

I believe you need to reset the end devices and set just master key. It may work to merge automatically if the activetimestamp is higher on the OTBR than the dataset on the end devices, but I’ve personally never tried it. 

You can probably also do “dataset channel 25” then “dataset commit active” on the EDs. 

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