Hub-spoke mesh design question

[syrinxtech]

If you consider a mesh network as a hub and spoke topology (from a logical perspective), the Argon could be the hub and Xenon could be the spoke.

My question is this: From a resources perspective (network traffic, processor util, time, etc), is it better for each individual spoke to perform a Particle.publish call and have the data pass through the hub and onto the Internet, or is it better for each spoke to Mesh.publish the data to a single Argon, who then performs the Particle.publish as a proxy?

My initial thought is that it would be more efficient to have the spoke perform the Particle.publish…but I don’t have enough Xenon’s to perform any sort of realistic testing.

[cyclin_al]

@syrinxtech,

The decision at the moment has more to do with stability than with resources, although that could change in future.

@peekay123 has an earlier response here that should help you out, with the link followed by the specific quote:

Mesh range / external antenna?

@sean13, the range is very dependent on obstacles such as walls and floors. I first arrange Xenon “risers” as my Xenon/Ethernet gateway is in the basement. These risers are in good line-of-sight with the gateway and reliably maintain their connections. I then arrange a Xenon that connects well on the ground floor. This Xenon will be used the the ground floor devices. Finally, I setup a Xenon on the 2nd floor, again making sure I have a reliable connection to the ground floor riser Xenon. …

@peekay123

One thing I have done so far is to NOT do Particle Cloud operations on the Xenon mesh and instead keep them to Mesh pub/sub. All Cloud operations are done on the gateway instead with results sent to the mesh via Mesh.publish(). For now, I have found the mesh more stable and reliable with this approach.

[syrinxtech]

@cyclin_al Thanks for the reference. Hopefully over time we will build up enough collective test data to make the decision based on the best resource utilization and not worry about stability.

In my other mesh networking experiences the spokes didn’t have the capability to directly send data to the Internet and were forced to send it through a gateway. That worked fine as long as the gateway had enough horsepower to do its network maintenance tasks as well as be the traffic cop for all of the spokes.