Bluetooth Mesh as Repeater

[chong]

Hi,

Can an nRF5x device be configured as a BLE relay with Bluetooth Mesh?

I believe with the Central-Peripheral-Relay example, the Relay needs to establish connection with Central and Peripheral device before data transfer can happen. With Bluetooth Mesh as Relay, can I get the Central and Peripheral devices to connect without having to first connect to the Relay? i.e. using the Bluetooth Mesh Relay to re-transmit the signal as is.

[Hung Bui]

Hi Chong,

Please be aware that Bluetooth Mesh and BLE are not the same and currently we don't do GATT bearer in our Mesh SDK. So actually no Central-Peripheral-Relay communication here, unless you define your own proprietary protocol.

Also, in our current implementation of the Mesh stack, all node will act as Relay node, there is no low power node yet.

[Erhannis]

Has any of this changed in the past two years?  I, too, am interested in having a Central device connect to a mesh network, then communicating with an distant ordinary bluetooth Peripheral through the mesh network.  If this is not a standard feature of mesh networks in general, has any code been written to do it that can be written to an nRF52 device?

[Hung Bui]

Hi Erhannis, 

The current status is proxy role is supported, meaning you can connect a central device to a proxy node of mesh network. A proxy node can also act as a central and connect to a peripheral. However, there is no definition on how the BLE data can be relayed throw mesh network. It should be done proprietary. We don't have any example for this.