nRF52840 maximum data throughput

[DJ]

How many nRF52840 chips can be used simultaneously? Can all data and advertisement channels be used at maximum capacity (2Mbps/each) to result in an overall throughput of 2Mbps*N where N is the number of nRF52840 chips < # of channels available?

Thanks

[endnode]

Hi again, first you need to be very specific about what networking protocol you are talking about. 2Mbps is some physical bitrate modulated on top of one channel inside 2.4GHz ISM band. That has very little to do with throughput which is your concern. So are you taking about theoretical (proprietary) data transfer over nRF52840 radio or some specific protocol stack like BLE or IEEE 802.15.4 or ANT or what? Then you are talking about running it simultaneously. Do you mean having several chips on both sides and parallelize the stream? As most of the protocols are peer to peer you can of course run like that until you have available bandwidth in the radio. And this is again determined by the protocol stack you want to use because they differ in terms of number of channels, channel allocation (or hopping), link reliability mechanisms, overhead in lower layers etc.

[endnode]

OK, so you would like to use BLE. The channel hopping in BLE is exactly for the purpose of minimizing collisions but because BLE is very much time-dependent and these separate devices (running separate BLE stacks) would need to be in microsecond sync to be able to prevent these and have 100% of theoretical bandwidth. There is one way how to bypass the hopping and that's channel map which can be set for each device and you can limit the band down to single channel. Of course you will destroy original properties limiting collisions but if you are able to coordinate this mapping and at the same time ensure that none of assigned channels is noisy it could work. So theoretically you could get 37*1.36Mbps if you team 37 devices on each side and perfectly distribute available bandwidth...