It happens mostly at Channels 11 and 12. I get slow communication between my devices. I also tried using a packet sniffer. There was no other device detected (registered) so I concluded that there is no way that an external source is interfering my network. I just noticed that IEEE Address jumbled up resulting to a Frame Check Sequence failure.
Is this normal?What could be the possible reason for this? How can I improve this?
You might be getting interference from a non-ZigBee network (regular WiFi, etc) or other noise source that wouldn’t show up in your sniffer.
Interference isn’t exactly normal but I’ve had issues in the past on certain channels at certain sites. Just something you have to be aware of and work around. If the interference/noise is periodic instead of constant the network formation logic on the XBee may not be able to detect the poor channel when the network is created.
You mentioned the IEEE address jumbled. Is that a consistent feature or just something you noticed in a particular frame?
I would add, many non-Wifi 2.4Ghz devices really slaughter channels! 100% saturation. We did a job at a quick serve restaurant once. Before hours, things work beautifully! Clean comms without errors.
Then the drive-through opened … and wham, Zigbee had like 80% error rate. It turns out whatever ‘wireless audio’ system they used for the drive-through assumed (& owner was warned, but didn’t think to tell us) that it could 100% trash the 1st/Ch 1 Wifi range (so ZB channels 11 to 14). Note that the audio devices did NOT use Wifi - merely used the WiFi ranges with modest coexistence concern, like limiting itself to one ‘Wifi range’.
So we had to change the SC/Scan Channels, decided to force use of an upper ZB channel in the 20+ range - so avoid both the first & middle/‘common’ WiFi ranges.
It is consistently showing up on problematic channels. It appears in different frames.