DALI+ over Thread: Capacity

The post on Bluetooth NLC vs DALI+: Capacity and Performance has generated very valuable feedback. I promised to shed some more light on my network capacity calculations, so here they are. The key assumptions are: - The Thread network operates at 2.4GHz using IEEE 802.15.4 data links at 250kbps; - Transmitting nodes use Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) method to manage the shared communication channel; - Each unicast transmission is acknowledged - There are two hops (say: sensor → router and router → lighting controller) - The minimum data frame at PHY is 50 octets (+6: preamble + SFD), so ~1.8ms - The ACK frame (including the SIFS time) is ~0.5ms - The average CSMA/CA overhead is ~1.4ms That gives us 3.7ms per hop total. So with two hops we have the channel occupancy of 7.5ms. At full 100% channel occupancy that would give us capacity of 135 end-to-end messages per second (one way). But... 100% would simply kill the network. Thread is very fr...