Send vendor Information in Discovery Request

[tlifschitz]

Hi!

Has anyone tried and succeeded to use otThreadSetJoinerAdvertisement API to append custom vendor data (eg a serial number) to a Discovery Request?

I think this is not implemented on the FTD side, since MeshCoP::JoinerAdvertisementTlv is not parsed when receiving the Discovery Request, and also there is no CLI command to retrieve this information.

Can anyone confirm if this is not implemented? In that case what would be the easiest way to send custom data during joining process?

Note:

• Here DiscoverScanner::Discover appends advertising data to the discovery request message.
• Here MleRouter::HandleDiscoveryRequest parses the tlvs in the discovery request message.

[tlifschitz]

@jwhui maybe you can you shed some light on this. Thanks

[jwhui]

The Joiner Advertisement feature was something that we were prototyping, but never progressed. Note that it is not currently a part of the Thread Specification.

Some related PRs that were never merged:

• [commission] add joiner advertisement to the discovery request handler #5381
• [joiner-advertisement] add Joiner Advertisement CLI command #5406

[tlifschitz]

Thanks for the pointer Jonathan! Is there any specific reason for that not having been merged? Do you think however it is a useful feature for the general use case?

If so, and considering today it is not part of the spec, would you consider merging a PR with its implementation using a conditional compile switch (turned off by default)? Otherwise we can manage to send this custom data from the joiner callback.

[jwhui]

We didn't merge because it's not a standard Thread feature and we decided not to move forward with our intended use case.

We can consider merging this feature with a build flag that is disabled by default.

If you find it useful, we should also consider standardizing it within Thread Group.