Last week, I had a (telephone) interview with a company who said that (they thought) their problem required a wireless mess solution but that the environment that they worked in was too noisy for the 2.4 GHz band that available solutions (such as Zigbee) operate in, and they wanted someone to design (eventually, code and test) such a solution using a different wireless band.
Not having any experience at all of working on a mesh, I declined on the grounds of insufficient match for the job.
My gut feel for this task is that creating (the software for) a mesh network from scratch would be 5-10 (man) year's of effort and not the 9-12 months that the company would like it to be, and I would be on a hiding to nothing trying.
Does anybody have any experience of creating a, software, mesh solution from scratch who can confirm or refute my estimate of how long it might take - should the opportunity arise again :-)
TIA
tim