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Channel Blacklisting

The Thingsquare system uses channel hopping to allow systems to use the entire wireless spectrum and to avoid interference from other wireless equipment. By default, the channel hopping mechanism uses all its available channels, but sometimes not all channels are good for use. To tell the system to use only a specific set of channels, channel blacklisting is used.

The channel blacklisting mechanism allow selecting what channels the channel hopping sequence should use. Channels that are blacklisted are not used.

The channel blacklist is controlled by the access point, which distributes it to all nodes in the network.

The access point also measures the channel quality of each channel by keeping track of how many collisions that have been experienced on each channel.

Setting up a Channel Blacklist

To set up a channel blacklist for an access point, open the app or web frontend. Navigate to the access point in question.

Go to the Details tab, scroll down a bit, and tap the Blacklist Channels button. Tapping this button will request the channel statistics from the access point and bring up the blacklist selection window.

In the blacklist selection window, the quality of each channel is listed. Note that the number of channels will differ from different frequency bands: the 2.4 GHz band uses 16 channels, whereas the sub-1 GHz bands use 50 channels. One channel is used as the synchronization channel, which can not be blacklisted.

To select channels to be blacklisted, tap or click on the selected channels in the graph. The channels that are selected for blacklisting will turn black.

After selecting which channels that should be blacklisted, scroll down to the end of the graph and tap the Apply blacklist button. This will cause the access point to apply the channel blacklist to its network. Within a few minutes, the blacklist will have been distributed to the entire network.

Blacklisting channels on the 2.4 GHz band.

Blacklisting channels on the sub-1 GHz 868 MHz band.