Bluetooth mesh networking? [closed]

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I had an Idea and I was wondering if it was possible. I've googled it and can't seem to find any existing solutions. I was thinking of having a Bluetooth mesh network. The layout I was hoping to achieve is to have one central station (PC with bluetooth dongle) and then a bunch of bluetooth modules (preferably these) that would all form a mesh network with the modules around them. Not all of them would be in range of the "central station" but would need to communicate with it through the other nodes. The bluetooth modules would be hooked up to ATtiny85 chips if it makes any difference. If you have any questions just ask.

1. Is this possible?
2. Is it possible with the above bluetooth module?
3. Would they all have to be set up individually or could there be some sort of neighbor discovery?
4. Would there be security risks?
5. What would the limitations on the size of the network be?
6. Where should I start?

Answer 1

CSR has delivered a BLE mesh network solution

http://www.csr.com/news/pr/2014/csr-mesh

Answer 2

Not sure if you have found a reasonable solution yet, I am new to the BLE and was also thinking along the same lines of having a BLE mesh that can permit transmitting of signal up to a few miles or so. This way, sensors can be placed in remote rural areas and utilizing multiple hops of sensors, the data can be transmitted to the central controlling station. However, as of yet, I haven't seen a dual mode sensor that can assume both roles as needed.

The other approach can be to make use of TCP/IP bridge. This way, the device, which can be an iPhone or Android, listens to the advertised data, creates an IP packet and send it to the remote server. Obviously, for this to work you need to have cellular data network available. But granting ubiquitous data network or Wi-Fi coverage this solution sounds more promising to me.

NOTE: Here http://www.bluetooth.com/Pages/low-energy-tech-info.aspx they talk about star topology though, below is the excerpt:

Topology – Bluetooth low energy technology uses a 32 bit access address on every packet for each slave, allowing billions of devices to be connected. The technology is optimized for one-to-one connections while allowing one-to-many connections using a star topology. With the use of quick connections and disconnections, data can move in a mesh-like topology without the complexities of maintaining a mesh network.

Answer 3

Also have a look at FruityMesh. It is an open source implementation of a mesh network that is based on standard Bluetooth Low Energy 4.1 connections.

They use the Nordic nRF51 chipset in combination with the S130 SoftDevice.

Found on github: https://github.com/mwaylabs/fruitymesh/wiki

Answer 4

So bluetooth - as clearly pointed out in the comments - is not designed for mesh networking. Nor, honestly would you want to. It would be far to expensive both in fincances AND in processing time and battery power to handle such an operation.

Instead, why not use XBee? https://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=xbee&what=products

These XBee modules are not only designed to do EXACTLY what you want, but they are low cost and HEAVILY documented.

A much better choice for your wifi mesh.

Answer 5

well, theoretically it should possible to build a mesh networking behavior with BLE devices, though it has not been designed that way.

The idea would be to use the fact that BLE has been designed so it can work over disconnections.

So you could handle two connections with your device: one as a bluetooth master and the other as a bluetooth slave. Then you could run once as a slave and listen to the next device's services see if there is any event, and if there is, become a master and broadcast the event to the previous device until the event reaches the host. The tricky part would be to tweak the timings so it works fastly and smoothly.

Another way that should be less a hack would be to build an ANT network for the mesh topology, while having BLE to be able to connect each node to Bluetooth enabled devices. You could use something like the nRF51422 to do such thing.

HTH

Answer 6

As I undertand, Bluetooth is something designed to do data transmission with a low power consumption. So compared to 802.15.4, Bluetooth shows a much shorter communication range which means more device maybe used to build a network. And I think BLE is just a name, just some code pre-programmed into chip ROM. Anyone can modify the BLE protocol, if he gets enough coding experience.