Hi Ragnar,
I would recommend looking up the ANT Basics video describing ANT's built-in Isochronous Ad-hoc Time-Adaptive Multiplexing scheme which you can find at the thisisant.com website under presentations but I will try to summarize here.
An ANT Master channel breaks an RF space into "timeslots" which they then broadcast at a periodic rate into. Due to the bi-directional nature of an ANT channel, ANT masters can automatically detect when interference begins to drift into their timeslot and adapt correspondingly. This happens invisibly and seamlessly to any application layer.
This makes it very easy for any slave channel to synchronize to any ANT master, or in this case for one Continuous Scanning Mode device to see every Master Channel transmission.
There are many advantages to this scheme:
- Developers do not need to worry about clock drift (cheaper crystals) or co-existence as multiple ANT master channels, even on independent devices will automatically adapt to avoid collisions with each other
- This opens up many different types of topologies very easily such as one-to-many, many-to-one, star-to-star, relay nodes, etc
- Keeps both the Master and the Slave channels Ultra Low Power (ULP) and requires very little code space to manage saving the cost on additional flash memory
- An ANT device can have multiple independent Master/Slave channels
- Every link can be bi-directional
You are correct, an ANT device in Continuous Scanning Mode no longer needs to worry about any channel period constraints as it would simply keep the radio on constantly, but there are some limits still. The CC2570/CC2571 is rated for up to 300Hz of total ANT messaging (600 0.5Hz Masters for example) in the same RF space (10-30m LOS) before you would begin to see degradation, and I would certainly recommend using the fastest interface to the device you could.
Burst data is a bit unique in that it can interfere with the timeslots of other ANT Masters. Short bursts are perfectly acceptable but if your planning to have a heavy amount of data transfer, I would recommend looking into ANT-FS where there is a mechanism defined to take file-transfers to a different RF channel.
Auto-shared channel is unique in that it reverts back to a more conventional single master to many slave topology. The advantage is it allows the master to only use one channel while still maintaining bi-directional communication with many slaves. This allows the master to remain a periodic transmitter which saves power on the master end of the link. However, addressing adds additional latency as the master could only talk to each device one at a time, limited by it's own channel period.