Milluzzi Labs

I have gotten several emails over the past few months asking about my RS485 blocks and how to increase the speed or why they cannot get enough information out of the brick in time. Through that email chain I developed some good examples and content which I will share here.

For this example lets assume you are using a Dexter Industries’ NXTBee and a USB xBee receiver. Let’s step through the timing for this at 9600 baud. 9600 baud means we can transfer 9.6 bits per millisecond or just over 1 byte.

Time 0 ms: Write data to RS458 Send in NXT.
Time 1 ms: NXT processes data and prepares to send.
Time 2 ms: NXT sending 1 byte of data. (9600 baud)
Time 3 ms: USB xBee receives data and send to computer.
Time 4 ms: Data arrives on computer.

It took 4 ms to send 1 byte of data. That is slow by any account, but the real issue not not in bus speed. In fact, the NXT RS485 bus was only in use for 1 ms of that entire transfer. We also assume 0 send time for the xBee radios (which is a bit of a stretch). This means receiving a reply from the computer will take 4 ms as well. This issue is called latency. We have a minimum of 4 ms latency per RS485 send. Our throughput for this example is 1 byte and our bus speed is 9600 baud.
Now if we send 4 bytes at 57600 or 5.76 bytes per millisecond we get the following:

Time 0 ms: Write data to RS458 Send in NXT.
Time 1 ms: NXT processes data and prepares to send.
Time 2 ms: NXT sending 4 bytes of data. (57600 baud)
Time 3 ms: USB xBee receives data and send to computer.
Time 4 ms: Data arrives on computer.

Note that the time to get the data is still the same, but we were able to move 4 times a much in the same time chunk. This is why speeding up will improve your throughput. Our latency for this example is still 4 ms per transfer, but our throughput is now 4 bytes on a bus speed of 57600 baud. (And yes, we could have done 5 bytes in there, but I am keeping things in powers of 2.)

Now if we look at this in NXT to NXT communication:

Time 0 ms: Write data to RS458 Send in NXT.
Time 1 ms: NXT processes data and prepares to send.
Time 2 ms: NXT sending 4 bytes of data. (57600 baud)
Time 3 ms: NXT receives 4 bytes of data. (57600 baud)
Time 4 ms: NXT application reads data from RS485 Read.

Now we have a much higher throughput to the NXT via the xBee radios. Mind you if we used a wired connection we have a latency of 3 ms as we do not have that extra receive step. This is why a wired connection has lower latency.

I hope this helps you understand some of the magic of communication protocols. All three factors are important in determining network performance and will vary based on application.