Sensor Network with iOS: How many devices?

[Stephan]

Hi all,

what if I want a sensor network in my house with BLE. Can I just install, for example, 16 nodes in my house and connect to all of them with one iPhone? Or would you suggest to install one BLE-node that acts like a central for all sensors and to which the iPhone does connect to collect all data from all other nodes?

Do you have suggestions for that use case?

Thanks and regards, Stephan

[Ling LI]

For that purpose: Would it make more sense to develop several (for example) Zigbee Nodes to capture measurements and to act in a network through all the house and just to have one ZigBee/BLE-Bridge to connect to?

Yes. It's more than just "makes sense"; it's the norm :)

As for the choice of meshing protocol, you still need to consider. ZigBee has failed in the mass market due to many non-technical problems; now since one of its key founder company just got acquired, we may see some changes. There are proprietary alternatives available if you have control of all the sensor devices, and are not afraid of some vendor tie-in.

I would rather love to implement all this on BLE but I'm not sure if networking stuff (repeating etc) works with BLE?

I'm not exactly sure either. Let's wait for the BLE 4.1 standard. It's said peripheral-to-peripheral communication will be supported in this revision. If it delivers, yes it's possible to build a sensor network on top of it. However if you want to do control (concerning latency), then we better double check.