BLE Mesh Scalability

[gabdsg]

Hi!

We are experimenting with BLE Mesh on nRF52832. 

Our setup includes around 50 sensors located in a building which need to report sensor data ( 12 bytes ) in real time, at a rate of about 10 ms.

What we tried so far is to modify the Light Switch example to send larger packets instead but it throws a memory error after 2-3 packets, we also tried using UART example but that didn't work either.

Is our problem solvable with BLE Mesh? Are we taking the right approach?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[leonwj]

hello,

(1) It would be great to know which version of Mesh SDK you're running on

(2) Can you document the errors you are getting and/or post the error log is a response

(3) Based upon the numbers you provided above, you are pushing ~60KB of data across the mesh every second (50 sensors x 12 bytes x 100 intervals). The SIG mesh spec limits each node to 24 Hz (as confirmed within the Nordic nRF5 Mesh resource usage page - see the MSG_PER_SEC per node constraint). Can you not ensure that sensors only publish measurements if/when their value has changed or changed beyond a key variance/threshold? Alternatively, you could investigate the Nordic Instaburst feature to see if that meets your throughput needs.

(4) The following link may provide you with some additional insight (especially on throughput and segmentation (SAR))

In any case, the above are just some basic observations, post back once you have the additional details to share.

Regards,