Hello everybody!
Can i have a mesh with 1 coordinator and 30 routers. I have read that the limitation of the numbers of end-devices is 8 but i think that i can use 30 routers in the same mesh. Is this correct? Thanks a lot!
Yes you can have that many routers. What will happen is ~8 routers will be children of the coordinator and then each one of those routers will be able to have ~8 routers as children. Just keep in mind that you must have a few routers in place if you are wanting to use some of them as end devices. For example, you can have four routers and 26 end devices. The four routers will be children of the coordinator and the end devices will determine which parent to associate to.
Thanks for the reply! I think that the best way in my application is to have 1 coordinator and 30 routers because this routers are going to be far from each other. They are going to make a chain.
This is mostly correct. If using the XBee ZNET or ZB modules there is a limit to the number of childern each node can have (approximately 8). There is not however, a limitation on the number of router devices that can associate to any given node in the netowrk. The routers are not children of each other or of the coordinator. This is only a feature of a tree-srtucture based stack. Neither the ZNET nor the ZB modules use a tree based stack. Therefore, 30 routers are perfectly capable of associating to the network with no special considerations.
Only when the sleeping end devices come into play do the parent-child relationships need to be established, and the number of children per parent need to be of concern.
Pardon me. I failed to notice that this was listed in the 802.15.4 forum. My response above applies only to the ZNET and ZB modules (ZigBee). The 802.15.4 modules do not support router capabilites at all.
Some time ago a beta ZigBee firmware was released which acted just as wa described by the other gentleman above. That version is however no longer supported on the 802.15.4 modules, and hasn’t been for more than a year now.