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ESP NOW peer limit

Posted: Fri Jul 31, 2020 7:49 am
by Alekos2313
Hello all,
I am trying to figure out the capacity of a ESPNOW network. From IDF, ESP_NOW_MAX_TOTAL_PEER_NUM sets this to 20.
So, is this the maximum number of peers that may communicate over ESP NOW?
And if yes, what sets this limit? why not 32 or 256 or 8192?
What is special about the esp_now_add_peer() function? I assume the routing and addressing uses MAC, so I would need to use MAC as an address book. But what If my application can maintain a custom MAC address-book,
wouldn't I be able to "know" and talk to as many ESPNOW nodes as my address book holds?

My question comes from the need to form a local area network of peers (in the order of a few thousand peers), which will all
go in deep sleep for a long time, then given some event they wake up and transmit some data to a designated master peer, and sleep again. This makes ESP-NOW ideal since it is connectionless, and the connection and TX power overhead is minimized. But the limit of 20 peers in the documentation confuses me.

Thank you,
Alex