"You want the SPOT to act as a mesh router but the application running it does not use the radio."[1]
Experiment Scenario:
1. Network Structure
Each spot can communicate with its neighbor and only Spot 1 can directly connect to the base station.2. Test Cases
a. I deployed the same application to Spot 1,2,3 and 4. This application can use radio receive messages from the base station. In this case, the application and radio all worked. So we can draw a conclusion that the mesh router can extend the wireless signal in the entire network and we can probably use radio.
b. I made a little modification based on Case a. I removed the radio part from the previous application and configured it to Spot 1, 2 and 3. Then only spot 4 use radio for receiving messages. Finally, it still worked. So we can totally believe that turning spots as mesh routers is a good method to propagate a message in a mesh network.
c. In task 4, the mesh router can not only receive messages but also directly send (or broadcast) messages by radio.This case is kinda an addition of Case a.
[1]Quoted from Section "Configuring network features"(Page 21) of Sun™ Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) Developers’ Guide .This version of the Guide refers to V2.0(updated 16-April-2007)
