16 concurrent device linking , the central to use rf52 and peripheral to use rf51 , Is it feasible?

[lynnyang311]

    I have a new project that needs to be evaluated, but I still have some uncertainties, so I would like to ask you specifically:

    We are going to develop a one-to-many star structure network, where one master device is connected to up to 16 slave devices at the same time. Data throughput up to 500Byte/s per slave node,Considering the cost, we want to use nrf52832 as the master device and nrf51822 as the slave node.

    Can this meet the design requirements? Is nrf51822 chip suitable? Which SDK is appropriate for development?

[Sigurd]

Hi,

The nRF52832 with the latest SoftDevice versions supports up to 20 concurrent connections, so the star network is fully feasible. There are some throughput benefits to use nRF52 for the slaves also, since nRF52 supports 2M PHY(Bluetooth 5 high speed) and higher ATT MTU. So, if you have a simple slave application, and cost is a factor, you could consider switching out the nRF51822 with a nRF52810(192 kB flash /24 kB RAM) instead. But the master/central will need to be a nRF52832 or nRF52840. 

The throughput requirement at 500Byte/s per slave should also be feasible. We have some throughput numbers available here(nRF52 link, nRF51 link).