Need fast way for Bluetooth piconet of four devices to continue communication when "master" device shuts off

[kjhuebner]

I have a piconet of 4 devices, where 1 device is a master and 3 devices are slave.

Communication continuously occurs between master and the slaves.

But then the master is shutdown at an arbitrary time.

What's the fastest way for the remaining 3 devices to continue to communicate?

Does this require the discovery process to repeat, and links reestablished? Or is there a faster way to restore communication?

-Ken

Software Engineer

[bjorn-spockeli]

Hi Ken,

I would have all the nodes in the piconet run central and peripheral role concurrently, and then let the "slave" nodes connect to each other in addition to the connection to the "master" node. That way the "slave" nodes can communicate with each other if the "master" node shuts down. You could also appoint one one of the "slave" nodes as a new "master" node by putting all the node to sleep for a random amount of time and the first want that wakes up becomes the master.

Best regards

Bjørn

[kjhuebner]

Thanks Bjorn. I was thinking about a similar approach. Unfortunately there is little information about forming redundant Bluetooth piconets that "overlap or overlay" each other to create fail safe communication. It may be the case I will simply need to experiment with the hardware to determine if this works or not.

[bjorn-spockeli]

Yes, setting this up using 4 nRF5x development kits with the examples from our SDK as templates should be fairly straight forward.