SIMPLELINK-CC32XX-SDK: PS-Poll disable recommendation following version 3.40.00.05 release

Hi,

In an ideal world, you would want to disable PS-Poll when it is observed that the router is misbehaving with PS-Poll packets. There are two major signs of potential misbehavior:

(1) If disconnections frequently occur, despite good signal strength

(2) If power consumption is very high despite normal network conditions

In your code, you can have PS-Poll be disabled if those conditions are detected. The main advantage of doing so (keeping PS-Poll ON by default) is that you would only be affecting a small subset of deployed devices - changing the behavior of all devices you might have even if it's running fine is risky. This is why we have kept PS-Poll ON as default - if we were to change this behavior to OFF in a servicepack, then existing installations with the CC32xx might be adversely affected in a way not obviously transparent to users.

That being said, you could disable PS-Poll outright, and there customers who do so. There is a minor power benefit to disabling PS-Poll, depending on how many packets on average you receive from the AP per wakeup. The break-even is about 3 packets - if a wakeup that results in data RX will generally result in an RX greater than 3 packets, then you will save some power by disabling PS-Poll.

In case you want to read a detailed explanation of PS-Poll mode vs no PS-Poll (Null packet mode), this page has some excellent info: https://dot11zen.blogspot.com/2018/02/80211-power-management-with-packet.html

We are unfortunately unable to provide any of our AP testing results publicly, but if you observe PS-Poll issues with a specific AP I can check and see if we have observed issues with that AP's PS-Poll handling.

Let me know if you need more clarification, or have further questions on PS-Poll usage on the CC32xx.

Regards,

Michael