1.4.2 PRIME Sniffer

The PRIME Sniffer is a service of Microchip PRIME FW Stack that uses the PHY layer to provide received PLC or RF traffic from the PRIME network. The USI is able to serialize and treat this service independently. This serialization can be directly provided to the Microchip PLC PC tools to be analyzed or saved for later use.

The following figures show the USI frame format of the sniffer frames. In this case, the field MESSAGE DATA that appears in the USI general frame format (See Figure 1-4) is divided into two fields: HEADER (32 bytes) and PDU SNIFFER MSG.

Figure 1-5. PRIME Sniffer USI Frame Format
Figure 1-6. PRIME Sniffer USI Frame Header Field
As indicated in the preceding images, sniffer frames contain the received PDU (MAC encapsulation following the PRIME specification) and some additional information related to the PHY layer, which is included in the header part:
  • FRA T:
    • SPEC1_3: PDU type of the received frame (A, B, BC), see values in the sniffer_if.h.h file
    • SPEC1_4: PDU type of the received frame (A, B, BC), see values in the sniffer_if.h.h and rf215_sniffer_if_prime.c file
  • SNIF F: Sniffer frame version: 0x14 for current version
  • SNIF T:
    • SPEC1_3: Sniffer type version: 0x11 for PL360
    • SPEC1_4: Sniffer type version: 0x11 for PL360, 0x13 for RF
  • MODUL:
    • SPEC1_3: Modulation scheme of the received frame, see modulation values in the atpl360_comm.h file. The modulation scheme of frames received in the serial PHY layer is set to 0x0F.
    • SPEC1_4: Modulation scheme of the received frame, see modulation values in the atpl360_comm.h and rf215_sniffer_if_prime.c files.
  • SYM PDU: Length of the PDU in PHY symbols
  • SNR (Note 1): PRIME defined measurement of the SNR (from 0 to 7)
  • EX SNR (Note 1): High precision SNR
  • CHN (Note 2): Channel in which the frame has been received
  • CINR (Note 1): Minimum Carrier to Interference Noise Ratio
  • BERSOFT (Note 1): Viterbi soft bit error rate value
  • BERS MAX (Note 1): Viterbi soft bit error rate maximum value
  • Time Start or Time End: High precision internal counter to measure length (time) of the PDUs in microseconds in the PL360 platform
  • RSSI: Average RSSI in dBuV
  • PDU LEN: Length of the PDU in bytes
Note:
  1. Not available in RF. The padding field changes accordingly.
  2. The CHN in RF has two bytes.
For additional information about the PHY information, refer to these documents:
  • SPEC1_3: PL360 and PL460
  • SPEC1_4: PL360, PL460, and AT86RF215