User's Guide

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Figure 1 - Legacy Mesh topology
As can be seen, there are 3 types of nodes:
Node Type Description Power consumption
Coordinator Is required to form and maintain the
network. Organizes who gets to be
neighbours with who, and as such is
a single point of failure.
Cannot be battery
powered.
Router Can route messages through the
network on behalf of other nodes.
Can normally not be
battery powered, as they
must continuously listen
for messages from end
devices which may
transmit asynchronously.
End device Optimised for low power operation
and can only send (and receive)
messages on its own behalf. It
cannot route messages in the
network, and as such cannot be
used to build the mesh network
infrastructure.
Low power operation
designed for battery
usage.
Table 1 - Legacy mesh network node roles
The layered structure of the legacy mesh networks, puts limitation on scalability as well
as flexibility.
Another limiting characteristic of the legacy mesh networks is the message routing
principles. There are severe limitations on how well the routing protocols handle deep
network structures (e.g. more than 10 hops) as well as dynamic topologies. These