Suggestion for Setting up a Mesh Network

[Usama Masood]

Hi All,

We are trying to setup a mesh network of up to 40000 nodes at a time, accessible through a single (or multiple edge) nodes/routers. For PoC we created a BLE mesh (esp-idf/esp_ble_mesh/nimble) and when we reached to around 200 nodes the performance of mesh became really poor, so much that replies from a node can take upto a minute (even with enhancements related to retransmission delays etc)

We are using ESP32C3 and we cannot cache alot of network data as it runs out of memory.

Our use case involves each node to transmit a ping after each minute or more (currently adjusted to 5 min to decrease the network traffic) and should respond ASAP to requests from out side likely happen with a rate of 1 request per 10 second or more

We are currently trying to figure out an out of box solution or some ideas on how we can achieve this effectively

Happy to share more details, if needed

[username]

We are trying to setup a mesh network of up to 40000 nodes at a time

40k, is that a typo?

[Usama Masood]

No, we need to scale the solution to 40K nodes in a network (with each node 1m apart)

[chegewara]

No, we need to scale the solution to 40K nodes in a network (with each node 1m apart)

I think you may have many issues with such designed mesh network.
- it will be very noisy and may be not reliable
- since you can have "only" 32k unicast addresses you will need at least 2 app/net keys and probably new ble mesh feature which can bridge between them (ble 5.3 i think)
- message can be relayed thru 254 or 255 nodes max, so i dont know if its enough for you
- probably other problems i didnt think about which will pop up when you scale up

[ESP_Sprite]

Could you tell us a little bit more about your use case? Ideally we'd like to know what you are designing, but if you cannot, it would be good to know about the data going to be sent/received: How big is it? From where to where does the data flow go? Is latency important? Standard mesh networking indeed isn't really suitable for your use case, but it's possible there's a different solution.