Alternative to BLE Mesh - a star topology?

[Anders Andersson]

While visiting the Nordic Tech Tour we were discussing the pros and cons of BLE Mesh with a Nordic employee. He recommended that we also looked at a different solution, a proprietary(?) BLE star protocol. Since we did not have much time to discuss it further I thought I'd look it up later.

After searching the DevZone, GitHub and SDK documentation and examples, I can not find much information about this, so I wonder if I'm looking for the wrong thing or if I misunderstood something.

Essentially I'm looking for an alternative to Mesh since we won't use more than roughly 10 devices (nRF52840), and they will be placed such that there will be at most one "middle/repeater" node in between two communicating nodes. This mythical star protocol was rumored to use less power and work out-of-the box with BLE long range.

Am I searching for the wrong thing? Is there even such a protocol, or is this something that I'm expected to implement "manually"?

[awneil]

Was the person actually referring to an existing product, or just suggesting that you develop something proprietary yourself?

Does it have to be BLE? 

nRF52840 also supports IEEE 802.15.4 - there are many things based on that ...

Or you can go entirely proprietary ...

There's also https://github.com/NordicPlayground/nRF51-ble-bcast-mesh - which, I think, was a proprietary BLE mesh before the SIG released its formal BLE Mesh standard.

[Sigurd]

Hi,

With the S140 SoftDevice running on the nRF52840 you are able to run 20 concurrent BLE connections. That means that the nRF52840 can have e.g. 10 peripherals connections and 10 central connections at the same time, or 1 central connection and 19 peripherals connections.  It's not a proprietary protocol, it's still BLE. How the decives should connect to each other is up to you, so you can configure the topology as you want. We have a Youtube video illustrating this here.