On: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Proje...

[wesapien]

Did you consider separate VLANs for each type of Z-Wave hardware to reduce the broadcasts?

[resonanttoe → wesapien]

Zwave talks on 800-900MhZ and doesn't share medium with ethernet frames, so there isn't a concept of VLANs. Each Device meshes with anything and everything in its immediate broadcast range to provide some elasticity to the network. I can imagine at some high point of devices that the medium could become saturated

[dljsjr → wesapien]

As the other commenter said it's not a LAN issue. Z-Wave is a mesh radio protocol totally independent of the LAN. There are in fact issues with older Z-Wave specs and versions bogging down due to congestion.

[wesapien → dljsjr]

Ok my bad. It's a L1 or physical layer issue.

[burnte → wesapien]

The problem isn't the network, it's the number of devices.

[enobrev → burnte]

My (likely incorrect) assumption has been that my zwave stick is handling everything serially and falls behind when traffic spikes.

[X-Istence → enobrev]

It's not that the Z-Wave stick falls behind, when a Z-Wave device is broadcasting everything else has to go quiet (nature of RF), but the transmission speed is just very low, so when chatty devices (think sensors that report multiple bits of information such as humidity, temperature, light level, UV level, and more) are sending data you can't also turn on a light.

When you have a lot of those devices on the Z-Wave network (multiple motion sensors in a room to do more accurate presence detection and the like) those chatty devices slow down the network tremendously.