I want to place a Pi 3 somewhere in my house and battery powered sensors. The Pi will read the inputs from e.g. the same level, one level above and the garden. So 1-2 regular brick walls in between and a range between 0-50m.
I looked into different technologies from Z-Wave, Digimesh, XBee, ZBee, Sigfox etc. but in the end I landed on the more common technologies. Because on most of the above technologies you need different players e.g. in ZigBee you have three different types e.g. routers. Also the above technologies require either a very costly commercial licensing or the components are > 7$.
So right now I'm between BLE and Wi-Fi. A college of mine recommended me to use Contiki, an open source OS which makes it easy to setup a communication with sensors.
Questions
He explained to me that there are three layers: physical, protocol and routing. So 6LoWPAN is one of the routing options.
Can I make a mesh with Contiki and the ESP8266? Otherwise, I would go for the CC2650. I have seen there are mesh solutions with the ESP8266.
Both technologies seem pretty similar to me. Both have ranges ~200m (which are probably more 30m through walls). And are widely used. Where are the differences for my use case?