John said:
To anyone who has hands-on experience with PC Bluetooth
connections...
Should I try to consolidate the several Bluetooth devices
connected to my PC, through one Bluetooth receiver? Or are several
Bluetooth receivers for the several different devices a good
thing?
Thanks.
Why not just test it, and see how well it works ?
Multiple Piconets can operate in the same space,
without a problem.
A Piconet is one Master and seven Slaves. The frequency
hopping pattern and time slot usage, is coordinated
amongst them, so no collisions result. A slave has a fixed
opportunity to transmit.
When you run two Piconets, the hopping pattern on each
Piconet will be different. There is a risk a slave in one Picnoet,
could transmit on a 1MHz wide channel, at the same time as a slave
on the other Piconet. But recovery from this would be the
same as if there was RF interference in the area, that
happened to wipe out that 1MHz channel for a fraction
of a second.
I could not find a curve, or any test results, showing
how many Piconets you can run in one space, before the
thruput on each one is degraded too much. But you've run
that test case already. If you consolidate them, down
to one Master, then it's just a question of whether the
profiles of all the devices, fit within the available
(3Mbit/sec) bandwidth.
You can find more info in the Bluetooth article on Wikipedia.
Some comments on collisions, are here.
"Introduction to Bluetooth - Piconets and Scatternets"
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=23760&seqNum=4
Paul
