Mesh networks with master/slave setup

Question

Imagine there is a big physical open-space with 100s of IoT devices. All of them are inter-connected to each other through a mesh network (adhoc wifi) and each device has it's own data. Since it's a big space, the wifi router/access point can only reach to 10% of the 100 nodes i.e. 10 nodes. These 10 nodes are considered as primary master nodes and rest as slaves. Slaves could have their own slaves also known as Secondary Masters. So the hierarchy is like any typical organization. Everyone has a master and only 10% of the master nodes have access to the internet.

Goal is to collect data from all the nodes and push it to the central database that could hosted on AWS or any other cloud services. This would mean each slave has to transmit it's data to it's master and eventually to the top 10 masters who can push it to the cloud.

Does mesh network support retransmitting of data or are there any open-source mesh software that I can use for something like this?

Answer 1

Normally the network stack of the mesh network would handle this. An example of a mesh network is Zigbee. It's spec describes three device types:

Source: Wikipedia Zigbee

Zigbee devices are of three kinds:

Zigbee Coordinator (ZC): The most capable device, the Coordinator forms the root of the network tree and might bridge to other networks. There is precisely one zigbee Coordinator in each network since it is the device that started the network originally (the zigbee LightLink specification also allows operation without a zigbee Coordinator, making it more usable for off-the-shelf home products). It stores information about the network, including acting as the Trust Center & repository for security keys.[32][33]

Zigbee Router (ZR): As well as running an application function, a Router can act as an intermediate router, passing on data from other devices.

Zigbee End Device (ZED): Contains just enough functionality to talk to the parent node (either the Coordinator or a Router); it cannot relay data from other devices. This relationship allows the node to be asleep a significant amount of the time thereby giving long battery life. A ZED requires the least amount of memory, and, therefore, can be less expensive to manufacture than a ZR or ZC.

In your situation you would have several Zigbee End Devices, ten Zigbee routers and a single internet connected Zigbee Coordinator.

The Wikipedia page notes this open source Zigbee implementation: http://zboss.dsr-wireless.com/