ANT multi-hop broadcasting network

RE: ANT multi-hop broadcasting network

Petter Myhre — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 07:49:01 GMT

Exactly. I think you will have to split the network into smaller networks with 8 nodes in each and connect them through central nodes somehow. Please let me if you have any progress or of anything else I can help you with.

RE: ANT multi-hop broadcasting network

mst — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 20:42:09 GMT

Hi Petter,

Thanks for the reply and confirming that it is indeed not really trivial. I'm currently interested in networks with more than 8 nodes, which can only be achieved by multi-hop communication due to the 8 channel limitation. So what you implicitly suggest is to give certain nodes the special 'central node' role allowing to set-up a practical mesh or tree. I will take a look whether there is some way to make this possible. I'm also looking forward to the possibility to use BLE with concurrent Peripheral/Central/Broadcaster/Observer roles. At first sight this may be an interesting alternative for ANT to create multi-hop networks...

By the way, the ANT multi-hop problem reminds me a bit of the graph coloring problem in graph theory, where we want adjacent nodes to have different colors. or in our case, different channel that are used as a master. Then we should have k-coloring with k at most 8 to make things work... I might look into this a bit more...

RE: ANT multi-hop broadcasting network

Petter Myhre — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:09:47 GMT

As you may know, the nRF51422 supports up to 8 concurrent ANT channels. This implies that once you try to set up a network with more than 8 nodes, at least when there is no central nodes, it soon gets complicated and difficult. You may be able to do something clever with shared channels, but I can't visualize how, and I can't really recommend it.

If you are interested in a network with 8 nodes, please see this thread.

If you have any further questions, or if you have any suggestions, please don't hesitate to reply.