>I think this understates the complexity of getting the time slots right
It's tricky, but not impossible to solve by any half decent firmware engineer with low level understanding and some battle scars in the industry.
>Essentially, you want the timeslot to be much larger than the sum of all the jitters
Not really. Drift is inevitable but it's not so bad that you get huge fluctuations so quickly that you need to take such wide margins. Just sync all your receivers to the drift of the transmitter every few minutes/hours or so and you'll be fine. Depends on environmental conditions of course which you should know up front when designing you product.
>just that the more devices you throw at the system, the trickier it gets, in a way that does not scale linearly with the system size
Not really, you just sync all receivers to the drift of the base station via the same drift compensation algo. If it works on one device it will work the same on all. Of course you will reach a number of devices limit based on the max time slots you can have which is based on the amount of bandwidth you have and the access time you want for rach device slot. We got a couple of thousand device on one base station lasting ~1-2 years on one button cell so it was good enough.
It's tricky, but not impossible to solve by any half decent firmware engineer with low level understanding and some battle scars in the industry.
>Essentially, you want the timeslot to be much larger than the sum of all the jitters
Not really. Drift is inevitable but it's not so bad that you get huge fluctuations so quickly that you need to take such wide margins. Just sync all your receivers to the drift of the transmitter every few minutes/hours or so and you'll be fine. Depends on environmental conditions of course which you should know up front when designing you product.
>just that the more devices you throw at the system, the trickier it gets, in a way that does not scale linearly with the system size
Not really, you just sync all receivers to the drift of the base station via the same drift compensation algo. If it works on one device it will work the same on all. Of course you will reach a number of devices limit based on the max time slots you can have which is based on the amount of bandwidth you have and the access time you want for rach device slot. We got a couple of thousand device on one base station lasting ~1-2 years on one button cell so it was good enough.