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I'm currently working in a project and I need some advice on which RF technology to use

A brief summary

The system is as follow, a series of IoT's devices in line, separation between them is like 2 - 5 meters, the device will not have any kind of cellular network suppor nor a smartphone, they will communicate to the internet trough LoRaWAN technology, nevertheless this communication is kinda slow by nature, we need to achieve some degree of synchronization between all the IoT devices in line, that's why we are thinking on some secondary RF technology to communicate between the IoT's devices to achieve some kind of synchronization

What we need

We know that there are several RF-mesh IoT oriented technologies, we need help to decide which RF technology to use, the technology need to be:

  • Fast, to achieve a synchronization in the orden of 1 millisecond, or the fastest possible, ie. we need the Time on Air and processing time to be as fast as possible.
  • Direct Peer 2 Peer technology, due to the topology that need to be implemented this is not exactly a "mesh" topology, is rather "a line", that's why is hard to implement routers, and things like that, we were thinking to achieve communication trough connections one to one
  • Low energy, hopefully the synchronization process will not take more than a few seconds this will happen every 3 days or something like that, the rest of the time the secondary RF module can be turned off
  • Know low cost and popular modules to implement the technology in a custom PCB, any part number or buy link will be very much appreciated

What we were thinking

Currently we were thinking on use BLE to achieve this, but we are not entirely sure if this technology will fulfill

Finally

I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place to put this question, if any know of a better place to ask this, that will be very much appreciated too

Electromosaw
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1 Answers1

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My first thought was BLE! On the same direction, investigate RPL (it uses 802.15.4). There are open source implementations (contiki-ng) and a very active academic community/research, which will give you solutions along the road. For example, if it is peer-to-peer, eventually you will face the problem of "bottlenecks", i.e., some nodes will drain faster than others, so you might have to set some "hard" routes, or define certain nodes as "leaves" so they dont route other node's data, only their own. In general, you will find a lot of publications on the topic. The techs you specified, are more or less covered by both BLE, RPL, i.e., throughput, latency, etc. Both are masters in turning off /energy saving between transmissions. Some ESP32-XXX boards are RPL compatible, last I checked were ~8 euros.

George Violettas
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