How a few hundreds of BLE peripheral devices can be connected to a Dual mode Bluetooth gateway?

[Hari]

As a master device with a whitelist there is a limitation on how many slave devices can be connected. If i am correct, other than whitelist there is no restriction to the technology. So, i am wondering, Is there any way i can overcome this limit may be with a Gateway or something? Please correct me if i am wrong.
Reference: Overview and Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy: An Emerging Low-Power Wireless Technology by Carles Gomez, Joaquim Oller and Josep Paradells

[endnode]

Could you please provide direct link to the source? I'm afraid devil is hidden in tiny word "piconet". What is it???:)

[Hari]

www.google.de/url

[Hari]

in page 12 you have this table

[Hari]

From what i understand, Piconet is a star network with 1 Master and few slaves

[Ulrich Myhre]

It's not completely clear what you're asking: Are you wondering how this theoretical limitation is even possible, or do you want a device that can handle that amount?

To answer the first one: The only limitation imposed by the Bluetooth protocol is the actual radio time, and the fact that you need to give attention to a link before the supervision timeout hits. Given unlimited resources, perfectly scheduled links, perfect crystals that doesn't drift, maximum slave latency and supervision timeout, and sending as small PDUs as possible, it's possible to keep a lot of links alive. This is because you can focus on attending to the links that are about to time out, and only those. Performance and latency will be very bad, but the links should not drop.

However, the scenario with a large amount of links is not very practical, and quite hard to achieve. Links will drift in time and start overlapping, you will get a lot of noise on the spectrum, and latency is very bad (if keeping the connections alive is paramount). None of our current SoftDevices support very high amounts (50+) of links, but this is mostly due to RAM usage concerns.