RE: NRF52832 Dynamic Mesh with Security

Ole Bauck — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 12:16:14 GMT

Hi,

Nordic currently have a mesh solution called OpenMesh. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy advertising and scanning to communicate between nodes. When bluetooth smart mesh is released by the Bluetooth SIG, Nordic will have a solution supporting that as well.

OTA DFU is implemented for nRF51 in OpenMesh, and will very soon be added for nRF52 as well.
The OpenMesh is based on broadcasting (advertising). You can build an application that uses OpenMesh, and the SD to have BLE connections, for example like described here.
There is no limitation in number of devices. The only limitation is the number of mesh values that can be up to 65535 (see here).
There is no security in this mesh.
There are no current plans for IPv6 adressable nodes in this mesh.
The mesh is not power optimized at this point. You can make some nodes power efficient by enabling/disabling advertising/scanning in the application, making them leaf nodes, but some nodes have to be on all the time to rebroadcast messages.
There is no single point of failure in the mesh.
The mesh is BLE 5 compatible. BLE 5 is not released yet, so it cannot have any of the BLE 5 features.