"Mesh" (in thick air-quotes) here is just a way for self-organizing for shortest uplink hop count.
Strict uplink-downlink hierarchy still stays regardless of whether "manual uplink" or "mesh" mode is in use. Each repeater doing Source NAT still stays. Lack of "sideways" connectivity still stays (unless you configure manual DNAT which is incompatible with "mesh" mode to begin with).
I.e., if you have 3 of those ESP8266 repeaters with two clients connected to different repeaters, there is no (easy) way to have those two clients talk to each other. Let's say this is our network diagram:
...then, we have two options how to make Client 1 and Client 2 talk to each other:
- each client talks to the same server (local or cloud) and server takes care of passing the message;
or
- we configure static destination NAT (option portmap add) on both ESP8266-R2 and ESP8266-R3, and disable "mesh" mode (i.e. manually configure uplinks for all 3 repeaters);
...and arranging 1000 of those in a single string and routing a single packet through that is better avoided. "Mesh" mode helps a lot with this, by selecting shorter path to the internet and bringing topology closer to a tree, where possible.
Strict uplink-downlink hierarchy still stays regardless of whether "manual uplink" or "mesh" mode is in use. Each repeater doing Source NAT still stays. Lack of "sideways" connectivity still stays (unless you configure manual DNAT which is incompatible with "mesh" mode to begin with).
I.e., if you have 3 of those ESP8266 repeaters with two clients connected to different repeaters, there is no (easy) way to have those two clients talk to each other. Let's say this is our network diagram:
...then, we have two options how to make Client 1 and Client 2 talk to each other:- each client talks to the same server (local or cloud) and server takes care of passing the message;
or
- we configure static destination NAT (option portmap add) on both ESP8266-R2 and ESP8266-R3, and disable "mesh" mode (i.e. manually configure uplinks for all 3 repeaters);
...and arranging 1000 of those in a single string and routing a single packet through that is better avoided. "Mesh" mode helps a lot with this, by selecting shorter path to the internet and bringing topology closer to a tree, where possible.