Is RTS/CTS necessary to implement for the 40NBT Bluetooth functionality?

Answer

RTS/CTS is required for reliable operation to prevent the Bluetooth radio from being overrun by a more powerful host. The H4 transport protocol (defined by the Bluetooth specification) relies on hardware handshaking because there is no mechanism for error handling ? if the BT radio can?t keep up with the host and loses packets, the only recovery is a complete reset of the Bluetooth stack. If the data rate is slow enough that the BT radio never has to flow the host off then you can get away without hardware handshaking. But there is no way to really guarantee that.