Please Clarify the mesh network

[Ameer.Sheik]

Hello All

Could please tell me how mesh network is working. as per my understanding Bluetooth connectivity is point to point communication or one to one .(if i am wrong please correct me ) in this cash how mesh network happen

please clarify me doubt and could you please suggest me any reference guide for mesh network

Thanks Ameer

[endnode]

You are right, Bluetooth is normally (and that is similar for classic BR/EDR parotocols as well as LE) only peer-to-peer communication. However you can build mesh network on top of it as application. One approach would be to use directly LL or L2CAP layers (and that's also supported by Nordic stacks today - as well as many other vendors - so you can find such solutions over the internet), another is to build it on top of Advertising data (so you use spare space of ADV_IND packets to broadcast data to the air and other nodes can scan and re-broadcast further so data keep going) and another can be connection based where you take advantage of possible concurrent connections on each node and APP layer handles "mesh" protocol itself. All of these things can be found as examples, just use search function on this forum, blog zone and google (here are first two hits as example 1 2)

Recently BT SIG themselves released Bluetooth Mesh specification which again introduces kind of separate protocol which can co-exist with already existing standards like BLE. You can get basics from Nordic's description of their alpha implementation of that here.

[Roger Clark]

Thanks Thomas

I already have a load of spare "smart beacons" which have the nRF51822QFAA, so I wondered if they could be re-purposed as a mesh demo.

BTW. I think someone else did their own mesh implementation quite some time ago and published on github (I don't remember the URL), and it required 32k RAM.

I was just hoping perhaps I could get perhaps a 10 mesh demo working with these beacons I already have