General discussion about Thread and conserving battery power

[hertugen]

I'm working with Thread and got it, kind of, working with a C6 acting as border router and several H2's.

However, I still try to understand the concept of Thread, regarding the dataflow. I have several, interconnected nodes which needs to be battery operated, but still work as a minimal thread device... that is, reacting on external impulses from the GPIO, as well as work as a node in order to forward data from other nodes. However, at the moment, it uses around 25 mA which is way too much.

The speed of the data is not really a major concern, but saving battery power is - so my intentions are to have the nodes sleeping. If a node receives an impulse, this specific node wakes up, stores the impulse and shuts down. All the nodes should be synchronized, so that they all wake up at roughly the same time - like once an hour - send their data to the always-on-border router(s) and go back to deep sleep again.

The big thing about thread is supposedly that it works on hardwarelevel - but surely, this scenario must have been addressed? Or do I really have to program this functionality myself?

I have seen other discussions about this topic, but the common denominator is that they generally assume that the nodes have direct communication with the router, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of having a mesh structure in the first place.

Any good advices?