Microcontroller Bluetooth Multiple Connection Support

Question

What exactly is the bottleneck that might prevent a bluetooth device from being able to pair to more than one peripheral device at a time? Is it the connection, antenna, protocol, etc?

I'm planning to use a Gumstix module that connects to a bluetooth antenna with a U.FL connection and I can't find any information on whether it supports multiple device pairing. I don't know enough about how to bluetooth actually works to try to determine this on my own based on the specifications. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.

edit: I originally said multiple pairing, but I'm actually requiring multiple connections I believe to get multiple RSSI signals at the same time. RSSI requires full connection and not just paired right?

For background information I need to use multiple pairing in order to do some type of positioning calculations with bluetooth beacons using RSSI parameters. This is the board I have to use: https://store.gumstix.com/verdex-pro-xm4-bt-com.html

Answer 1

The Verdex Pro XM4-BT uses the Intel UniStone PBA 31308 Bluetooth module. You can find full product details in their datasheet. In brief, it supports 2 synchronous SCO/eSCO links, which is clearly not enough for triangulation. It does, however, support 7 point-to-multipoint connections. I haven't spent a lot of time with Bluetooth's inner workings, but what I think that means is that you should be able to quickly switch between paired devices and collect RSSI data from two of them at a time.

Hope this helps. If you have any other questions about Verdex Pro, or any other Gumstix COMs, I'd be happy to help out.