Long range coexistence

[damien5606]

Hello,

We'd like to connect 50 bluetooth 5 devices (nRF52840) to a Receiver (made of multiple centrals nRF52840) with a long range (PHY 250kbps, conn interval 50ms, no dle, ATT_MTU 23)

As I understood there're 37 bluetooth channels + 3 for advertising. If I assume that a nRF52840 central can be connected at 5 nRF52840 peripheral at the same time (I guess on the same bluetooth channel), I would need 10 nrf52840 centrals in my receiver to connect all my devices. So I'd use 10 channels.

Do you think they will interfere with eachother (knowing we'll work with long distance signal so very weak ones) or the space between the channel is big enough ?

Thank you a lot,

-Damien

[endnode]

Hi Damien,

The problem of shared channels is only on 3 advertising channels but once the connection link is established all remaining 37 channels (unless devices restrict some of them through channel map) are used through frequency hopping mechanism. Since BLE is based on timed events and most of the time there is silence the capacity of whole 37-channel spectrum is enormous and even if some collisions happen here and there the link is ready to handle it transparently (so applications on top don't even notice except small drops in actual data throughput). Normally you can have hundreds or even thousands of active links with very little interference in the spectrum.

On advertising channels again devices use different timing (and there is mandatory jitter added so even if they meet on few events and interfere for few packets they will drift quickly to different timings and problem is solved) but in certain situations you might experience more crowded situations and interference. But that's when you have hundreds or rather thousands of active broadcasters or dozens of very active scanners vs. few low-frequency advertisers. So far you should be fine (and maybe some refresh about how BT LE PHY and Link Layer work would help;)

Cheers Jan

[endnode]

First of all what is your environment? The fact that you use long range air-speed doesn't mean you will beat interference in difficult environments, 2.4GHz radio is nasty thing which behaves counter intuitive sometime. Then you can debug this on several levels: normally link (HW) capabilities are tested by DTM which now is released (as far as I understand) innRF5 SDK with BT5 features such as different air-speeds. This would test nicely that both devices at that distance have on given channel naturally low packet error rate. If this fails you already have problem in "simple" case meaning either your environment is too difficult for current BLE technology or your HW faulty. If this is OK then you can go to more high-level tests like having throughput demo on single link and again carefully get statistics on tests (not running it once;). An finally do it with multiple links.

(1/2)