OpenThread Border Router Telemetry Poller: IoT Mesh Monitoring

Deterministic 802.15.4 Radio Inspection, MQTT State Ingestion & Live Mesh Topology Observability

Architectural Summary

Low-power IPv6 wireless mesh networks (Thread/Matter) require continuous link-quality and routing topology monitoring. This Python system daemon interfaces directly with an OpenThread Border Router (OTBR) container instance, parses neighbor tables via ot-ctl, and streams real-time radio metrics (RSSI, Link Quality, MAC address, Frame Counters) to an MQTT broker for visualization in Grafana.

graph LR
    subgraph Thread Wireless Mesh
        A[Matter Node 1] <--> B[Matter Node 2]
        B <--> C[OTBR Radio Co-Processor]
    end

    subgraph Host Execution Layer
        C <--> D[Docker Container: otbr-daemon]
        E[otbr_poller.py<br><i>Python Daemon</i>] <-->|docker exec ot-ctl| D
    end

    subgraph Telemetry Core
        E -->|Publish JSON Metrics| F[Eclipse Mosquitto MQTT]
        F --> G[Telegraf / InfluxDB]
        G --> H[Grafana Dashboard]
    end

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1. Engineering Highlights

1. Deterministic Radio Inspection:

   • Uses non-blocking subprocess calls to query ot-ctl neighbor table and ot-ctl router table.
   • Sanitizes ANSI terminal output and parses raw hex MAC addresses, RSSI (dBm), Link Quality In/Out metrics, and age intervals.

2. Resilient MQTT State Publishing:

   • Formats telemetry into structured JSON payloads with automatic reconnection backoff.
   • Emits Home Assistant-compliant MQTT discovery payloads allowing auto-provisioning of device sensors.

3. Production Deployment:

   • Deployed as a systemd service on the host node (llmadmin01) with automatic crash recovery, logging directly to journald.

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