The best way to connect my mesh network to the company Wifi.

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
1

Mesh Network Architecture:
The nodes are Arduinos (not sure which Arduinos yet), with Xbee transmitters. Each node will have a sensor.
To start with, I am using PH sensors. The coordinator will be an Arduino Mega, with an Xbee receiver. The
coordinator needs to send the sensor data via the company Wifi system to the internet.

UNKNOWN: The Best way to transmit the sensor data from the coordinator to the WiFi system

Two possibilities that I know of:

  1. The Arduino Mega could have a Wifi shield. It would also have to have a Xbee shield. I do not know
    if I can have both shields on the Mega. And if I can, will there be interference between the Xbee and Wifi ?

  2. I can have another Arduino connected to the coordinator. The coordinator would have the Xbee shield, to receive
    the node data. The second Arduino would have the Wifi shield. I do not know how I would connect the two Arduinos.
    I know there is a USB and serial port. Would either of these work to transfer the data from the coordinator to the
    second Arduino?

2

If you're looking for a potentially painful laerning experience then use the WiFi shield.

I personaly use have used an Ethernet Shield connected to a little WiFi pocket router in client/bridge mode. that combination, while more bulky, IMHO still offers the most flexibility and works out of the box. You can use the standard Ethernet library and all it offers in matured functionality. DHCP, DNS, mDNS etc.

As I mostly work with Teensy boards (www.pjrc.com) I now successfully have used a WIZ820io Ethernet module in conjunction with a TP-Link TL WR703n and TL WR702n in a few projects.

This solution is more functional solution and less expesive than the WiFi shield.

3

How about Arduino TRE

  • Atmel ATmega32u4 processor has it pins broken out in the classic Arduino form-factor in the middle of the board—along with an XBee socket.

  • 1-GHz Sitara AM335x processor has build in Programmable Real-time Unit, The PRU has dual 32-bit RISC cores, shared data and instruction memories and an interrupt controller (INTC). and it run at 200 Mhz

  • Arduino TRE has build in Networking Ethernet 10/100

  • TRE has 1 USB 2.0 device port, 4 USB 2.0 host ports. could be easily add on usb wifi adaptor.

  • CPU run twice faster than Raspberry Pi and few times faster than Arduino Yun and 100 times more performance than Arduino Leonardo or Uno.

  • TRE has SRAM DDR3L 512 MB RAM

  • Clock Speed 1 GHz

  • The Arduino TRE is expected to be available in spring 2014.