Guidance on direction (Use of mesh network)

[camo200sx]

Hello. I'm wanting to create a network of ESP devices that can take readings and send to an MQTT broker. It would look something like this given nodes would be set out in a straight line fashion opposed to having one central node and others around it

Router - root(1) - intermediate parent(2) - intermediate parent(3)

Measurements would be taken at 3 & 2 and then passed to 1 to be sent to MQTT.

Completely new to ESP-mesh and am confused. To achieve something like this, can I simply use the Arduino IDE? Or do I need to install ESP-IDF? I'm struggling to find an example of such

Any info much appreciated!