Whitelisting and Directed Advertising Simultaneously

[droberson]

Hello,

• SDK: 15.2
• SoftDevice: s140_nrf52_6.1.0
• FreeRTOS
• Hardware: nRF52840 (Custom boards)

I have a few questions.

1. Can a Peripheral device use both a whitelist and directed advertising at the same time?

I have enabled both on my device with a static BLE MAC (No peer manager, just using the ble_advertising.c module with BLE_ADV_EVT_WHITELIST_REQUEST and BLE_ADV_EVT_PEER_ADDR_REQUEST respectively). Upon doing so, I notice that only BLE_ADV_EVT_DIRECTED is received and ADV_DIRECT_IND packets are received by my BLE wireshark sniffer capture. When I disable directed advertising, I see that BLE_ADV_EVT_FAST_WHITELIST is received and ADV_IND is received in the wireshark capture. This leads me to believe that the answer to this question is no.

2. If whitelisting and directed advertising cannot be used at the same time, and assuming directed advertising takes priority, does directed advertising essentially function as a whitelist and thus block connection and scan requests from all devices except the one being directly advertised to?

Thanks,

Derek

[Hung Bui]

Hi Derek, 

1. Correct, the answer is No. 

2. Correct. 

When you use directed advertising, it's only allow connections from the central with address in the directed advertising packet. Either static address or resolvable address. It's function like a whitelist but with only one device in the list. 

When directed advertising, the normal whitelist will not be used. 

[droberson]

Thanks!