DWM3001CDK firmware to do Nearby Interaction TWR with multiple phones via multiplexing?

Wireless Connectivity Ultra-Wideband
1

Hi,

I’m trying to have multiple iOS phones do TWR with a DWM3001CDK.

I’m successfully using the DWM3001CDK-QANI-FreeRTOS_full_QNI_3_0_0.hex firmware, but that firmware (please correct me if I’m wrong) supposes that a single Nearby Interaction session (and thus a single phone) is happening/communicating with it at a time.

As far as I understand, if we wanted to “multiplex” multiple phones to do TWR with a single DWM3001CDK, we would have to connect over bluetooth + do TWR + disconnect as fast as we can on all phones. This entire sequence seems to take ~~4s, which is limiting in terms of the number of phones that could “share” a single DWM3001CDK.

Are there existing firmwares for the DWM3001CDK that can handle multiple concurrent Nearby Interaction sessions (probably by handling/managing multiple simultaneous bluetooth connections, as the Nordic chip does allow more than one connection at a time)?

More generally (happy to start a different thread about this), what are the known strategies to overcome this problem, besides managing multiple bluetooth connections?

  • Can the NI discovery tokens / accessory configuration be “cached” and re-used i.e. is it possible to not re-start an entire NI session if you are re-connecting to a phone you previously connected to?
  • If the DWM3001CDK was to be extended with additional wifi hardware (like an ESP32), would communicating the NI tokens/configurations over that channel allow TWR multiplexing to happen with multiple phones at once?

Thanks a lot!

2

what you want is called many to many, instead of the current one to many.

qorvo has said many to many is not implemented.

part of the problem is using bluetooth sessions to initiate and maintain the NI session. bt only supports one connection at a time. as soon as you connect, other devices cannot find this device anymore.

all the other distance protocols require additional infrastructure to work. wifi requires some access point… nfc is to too short range.

in our usage we only range to the nearest available device of a certain type. we have a colocated esp32 device which manages the additional infomation

3

Thanks for your reply!

A few points:

  • the DWM3001CDK does support doing FiRa ranging with up to 8 devices (which is only a part of the Nearby Interaction, of course) – this can be seen in the fira firmware source code, and is accessible using the CLI command (again, this is fira only, not NI)
  • I agree that the bluetooth session is a limiting factor in the currently distributed firmware, but there are a number of possible strategies here (as one example, the Nordic chip of the DWM3001CDK does support multiple simultaneous Bluetooth connections)
  • you’re absolutely correct that wifi requires additional infrastructure (a wifi chip at the very least talking to the board + access points, a server, etc.) - but I am curious to hear if anyone has experimented with this, has examples to share, etc. Here my line of questions is mostly: “if you remove the current “problem” of the bluetooth connections, and swap it for wifi (as a thought exercise), does it make multi phone TWR simpler, a lot simpler/faster, or equivalent”

I’m hoping that Qorvo (or someone else) might have an implementation of this either in the works, or is something that they could share or have already developed (as a product or platform). I remain hopeful about this :slight_smile:

Cheers