Example for setting up BLE long range mesh network between several nodes

[Rostokus]

I am starting building industrial-grade system which contains several nodes connected via wireless channel.

As a wireless protocol I decided to use BLE 5 due to long ranges ( I need nearly 100m indoor) and a good security.

Can I use NRF52840 to setup wireless network between 8 nodes where each node can send messages to all sibling nodes?

Are there some examples already in SDK?

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Bluetooth Mesh is not based on the Bluetooth 5 stack unfortunately. You could take a look at the multilink example, where a central node can connect to 8 other peripheral nodes. You could have a long range connection between the central node & each peripheral node. You could then send messages from the peripheral nodes to the central node & let the central node relay those messages to all of the sibling nodes for example.

[Rostokus]

Bjørn Kvaale said:

You could then send messages from the peripheral nodes to the central node & let the central node relay those messages to all of the sibling nodes for example.

that's a good point, but it will most likely increase the communication latency between peripherals. In my case I would like to achieve up to 100-200ms latency between any nodes. Is it possible with BLE?

[Rostokus]

Bjørn Kvaale said:

Bluetooth Mesh is not based on the Bluetooth 5 stack unfortunately

Please elaborate on this. Can we use Bluetooth mesh with conjunction with Bluetooth 5?

www.nordicsemi.com/.../nRF5-SDK-for-Mesh

[David Edwin]

You can switch the RF PHY being used in the nRF Mesh SDK from 1Mbit PHY to the coded PHY used in long range.
This will give you the range some usecases seem to prefer.

You can look at this older case to enable the Mesh with coded PHY for longer range.

[Bjørn Kvaale]

As David said, you can update to coded phy in mesh, but it would most likely not be qualified if you want to use it in an end product. Regarding communication latency, this should be possible.