XMesh is a full featured multi-hop, ad-hoc, mesh networking protocol developed by
Crossbow for wireless sensor networks.
An XMesh network consists of nodes, Motes, that
wirelessly communicate to each other and are capable of hopping radio messages to
a base station where they are passed to a PC or other client. The hopping effectively
extends radio communication range and reduces the power required to transmit messages, low-pwer (5+ years of battery-life).
By hopping data in this way, XMesh can provide two critical benefits, improved radio
coverage and improved reliability, XMESH is self-forming and self-healing. Two nodes do not need to be within direct radio
range of each other to communicate. A message can be delivered to one or more nodes
in-between which will route the data. Likewise, if there is a bad radio link between
two nodes, that obstacle can be overcome by rerouting around the area of bad service.
Typically the nodes run in a low power mode, spending most of their time in a sleep
state, in order to achieve multi-year battery -life.
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