Forcing a Zigbee router device to rebuild its neighbor/routing table

[evannuss]

I am building a Zigbee network of devices where the devices are moving around quite a bit. This means the routes from nodes to the gateway need to be repaired often. I know that Zigbee will do this automatically after some amount of minutes, but for my application, we need this repair to happen much more quickly, on the order of a few seconds. We are using Home Assistant as our gateway device and the way we have it set up means customization options are very limited, so we are looking at the routing device for a solution. Is there a way to force a router device to rebuild its neighbor/routing table? We figure that if we can do that at a set interval, the network will repair itself much more quickly our problem will be solved.

[Edvin]

Hello,

Ideally, Zigbee isn't really intended for nodes moving around a lot. If you don't need the nodes to attach to any 3rd party zigbee devices, I strongly recommend you to look into some other protocols, such as Bluetooth Mesh. The reason for this is that Bluetooth Mesh is a flooding network, while Zigbee (and OpenThread for that matter) is a routing network. As far as I know there is no way for the network to force this functionality. I assume that it is not only one node that is moving, but perhaps the entire network?

[evannuss]

Hi Edvin,

Thanks for your answer. That is very good to know. It is indeed the entire network that would be moving around, meaning we would need routes to be updated almost constantly. 

So just to clarify, as far as you know, there is no way to force a Zigbee network to update its routes at a fixed interval? It's simply something that happens automatically that we have no control over?

[Edvin]

That is correct. If it was, it would also need to tell the other nodes to do so, if your network was to be compatible with other Zigbee devices, and there is not.

I recommend looking into Bluetooth Mesh if there is really not a good reason to use Zigbee.

BR,
Edvin