Does any softdevice support Mesh, per BLE5?

[Mitch996]

Hello, I'm pretty sure the new BLE 5 will come out soon and it will integrate the mesh. And if mesh needs to be done at a protocol level, it must be the softdevice.

So, any softdevice so far support mesh? Or at least, any plans?

I'm usre nrf52840 support BLE5.

[Mitch996]

@Hung Bui I think I understand what you mean, but emotionally I find it very difficult to accept. So... basically we are looking at a Mesh protocol/stack that happens to share a lot of common traits with BT, instead of a BT protocol/stack that has Mesh as one of its features?

What does this imply on the softdevices? Do I have to mount a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT softdevice if I want to use BLE Mesh, at the cost of a lot of BLE legacy features being unavailable? And by that I mean for example, there won't be S132M SD which is S123+Mesh, but rather, S500, which doesn't really share much with S110, or S140, or any previous SDs?

[endnode]

(I would simply be down to Earth with "mesh networking" buzz word as I haven't seen any of them working reliably in practice yet. Messing it with main standard would probably lead to more disappointments and harming BT brand, that's how I read it. But I'm pessimist, don't look at me if you believe in mash network magic;)

[Mitch996]

don't look at me if you believe in mash network magic;)

Hello @endnode according to my intel, all the big players, Sony, Samsung, Apple etc. are working on it... I do not suppose they are just going to waste all those hard earned corporate dough, are they?

[endnode]

Well there are people working on it for 3+ years as their core business and still these networks are barely usable for anything else then sending few bytes per day and having agility in the network in the range of dozens of seconds up to dozens of minutes. I've evaluated things like Wirepas PINO, CSR mesh, Nordic experimental BLE mesh and few more, none of them hold in larger scale and real environment (2.4GHz noise), packets were traveling minutes. So yes, it transports the data but I have completely different performance requirements so I wouldn't even call it "network" (sending a pigeon would be faster and more reliable). More people researching the better but let's not pretend that this problem was waiting for some big corp R&D guru who would suddenly make it working (also outside the lab and not only on his desk with 4 dev kits).

[Daniel Wang]

I have been in contact with Bluetooth SIG this week, and been told it will be released this month(July).