Suggestion for Setting up a Mesh Network

[Usama Masood]

Any idea how large a surface we're talking about here? How many hops would be needed to go from one end of the network to the other?

Expected floor area is roughly 8,000 - 10,000 sqm

[ESP_Sprite]

Hm. I'd personally roll my own protocol then, based on ESP-Now, and without an actual mesh. If you can have a few (like 10? depends on RF conditions I guess) nodes that are connected to a backhaul of some sorts (Ethernet, perhaps WiFi via a 2nd ESP32) you technically don't need store-and-forward as all nodes can talk directly to one of the backhaul nodes. You don't seem to need a low latency, so you could do some sort of time division multiplexing: the backhaul divides a timeframe (e.g. 10 seconds) into e.g. 400 slots of 25mS each. Each slot allows only a small set of nodes (e.g. 10) to respond with their status (thus making sure there's little chance of collisions). At the beginning of each slot, the backhaul node broadcasts a status request packet, indicating which nodes are to respond, and if a request is pending it'll also send that. Once a node has responded with its status, it knows it won't have to do anything for the next 10 seconds, so it can shut down its radio for that duration. You can put the backhaul nodes on different channels, so they won't interfere with eachother.