How many BLE beacons does BLE Master can read where BLE Tags/Beacons will be just adevertising

[manjunath.g]

Hi Team,

We have a new requirement on students tracking system when the students are in School bus.

School bus can contain seats of 25-50 depending on the type of bus.

When the driver starts the bus, all the students name BLE tag ID should be captured by one gateway and that gateway collects all the tag information and send it to cloud.

Each student will have BLE Tags attached to their school ID cards.

Once the student get down from bus, The gateway loses particular advertising ID and then It can register it.  

So, the question is does the Gateway can read all the tags information? when all the tags are only advertising simultaneously?

Please help in clearing the above question

Thanks

Manjunath

Senior Hardware design engineer

[Susheel Nuguru]

There is no limit on how many advertising packets can be read when simultaneously transmitting. To avoid collisions of the packets it is recommended to advertise less frequently (bigger advertising interval). When the students come into the bus, there will be ample time to detect the advertising packet from a student when they come and settle in the bus. That is, it is still ok if the gateway in the bus misses to read few advertising packets from a student as long as they are advertising many times during their time within the bus.

[manjunath.g]

Thanks Susheel for your valuable response,

Can you say some numbers for Tag advertising interval and Central's reading interval, say there are 50 beacons to be monitored.

[Susheel Nuguru]

Central should be scanning and reading fast. You can have the fast scanning interval of (example) 10ms and a window of 10ms (assuming that the gateway has no limitations on the power).

The tags can for example have an advertising interval of few seconds (you need to test it on the field to get better estimate).