User's Manual

13 Flooding mesh: Using the repeater functionality

The module can be run as a repeater to artiﬁcially extend the range of sending devices in an

existing network. If the module is conﬁgured as repeater, it can be simply added to existing

Figure 6: Range extension using several repeaters

wireless networks consisting of compatible modules. With this, the newly generated mesh

network uses the so-called "ﬂooding technique" to deliver data packets from their source to

their destination device.

The repeater module itself simply listens to the conﬁgured channel and forwards all received

packets except the ones addressed to itself. Thereby a random delay is used to avoid RF

packet collision. To reduce trafﬁc on the frequency channel, each repeater device checks

before repetition, if the channel is free and whether it has already sent this packet before or

not. Thus, every repeater sends each packet only once.

In a network with NumRP repeater devices, each data packet is repeated NumRP times.

Therefore each packet that is send from node A to node B forces a trafﬁc of NumRP+1 data

packets in total on the frequency channel.

Besides of this, an module that is conﬁgured as repeater supports also the functions of a

standard module. Thus, it can receive data and can initiate the data transmission to other

modules.