BLE sniffer vs ANT continuous scanning mode: nRF52832

[Oleg@LTG]

Right now we're using nRF52832 on our devices for various BLE Sniffer features.

We need to improve both capacity and throughput of the BLE Sniffer - ideally we need to receive 150-200 messages per second from different wireless sensors. Otherwise we start observing issues even with 30-40 BLE sensors around, the packet loss for BLE is pretty large ... 

We started thinking about TDMA-based wireless protocol instead of BLE, because it looks like the BLE Sniffer simply can't handle even 100 messages per second. But we need to handle even more.

After a small research we discovered the ANT protocol with its Continuous Scanning Mode, which is somewhat similar to the BLE Sniffer concepts. Plus, the ANT protocol is based on TDMA-protocol with much better capacity than BLE for scanning and sniffing.

So we're planning to start some performance testing to compare the BLE Sniffer vs the "ANT Sniffer". Our goal with ANT is about achieving 200 messages per second with acceptable packet loss numbers ...

Before we will jump into the implementation details and activities - any advices or useful references about the ANT Continuous Scanning Mode on nRF52? Has anybody tried using the scanning mode with hundreds of sensors?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

[Simonr]

Hi

Yes, in the Timeslot API you have access to control the radio as you'd like, both using time division and frequency division. You have full control to do what you'd like here. However, you will have to implement this yourself, as we don't have anything like this ready as an example I'm afraid.

Best regards,

Simon