I'm assessing whether ANT is suitable for the network deployment I have in mind, and I would appreciate to hear any thoughts you have on this.
I have a network of say 20 nRF51422 nodes. On a regular basis, a node should inform every other node in the network. This may require multiple hops. All nodes have the same characteristics and have no idea of the device id's in the network and therefore need to resort to broadcasting the data. I want a node to broadcast a packet, and nodes receiving it to broadcast it again for a given amount of hops. In this way I want the packet to reach every node in the network.
As there is no central node that can initiate the creation of for example a routing tree, and the master and slave side of every channel should be explicitly set, this seems to be a bit tricky as far as I can see. I could for example think of every node keeping all channels in a shared slave role (also after search time-outs). If a node has a packet to send, it randomly picks a free (i.e., not in connection) slave channel and make it a shared master to communicate the packet for a couple of seconds. Receiving nodes pick another free slave channel and make it a shared master to forward to data. And so on.
I expect this could work in practice if the network is not too dense and there are not a lot of packets to be send, but I can imagine that this could quickly cause a problem resulting in neighbouring nodes selecting the same channel to use as a master and thereby are not able to communicate with each other... Any suggestions on a protocol that would be more reliable and less random that fits this situation?