I have a few Zigbee devices in my house and almost half are routing nodes; these consist of Sonoff and Ikea switching devices. I use Zigbee2MQTT integration at this time. The behavior that I’m seeing is that the non-routing end devices will connect to a routing device when instructed to do so, but all of the routing devices will ONLY connect to the coordinator when in range. This results in the link quality being less than optimal for certain switches in my house. So even if there are routers nearby with better LQI (120+), a router node will always connect to the coordinator, even if that link to the coordinator results in a LQI of less than 10. This is “probably” implementation-specific by the manufacturer, but I’m putting this out there to see if anyone has any tips or tricks that can help in this situation. Thanks.
Well this is not the case. Some end devices will connect directly to the coordinator if they are close to it or have better connection with it than with router. Routers will connect to the coordinator but not all. In my case some routers have router to router connection and not exclusively router to coordinator connection. And this is not manufacturer specific as I have smart plugs from the same manufacture, even bought it from the same online store. Some of them are connected directly to coordinator while other have router to router connections. Connections will change on the fly so router that is connected now to the other router maybe tomorrow wlll be connected to coordinator maybe it want.
I have 68 zigbee devices and this is my experience with it.
@ddaniel - May I ask what is the name brand of the routers (smart plugs) you’re using? I currently have 62 Zigbee devices in my house, 21 of which are routers, and all of them connect to the coordinator. Two of those are just in really bad spots, on the floor and behind a bunch of obstructions to the coordinator, so I can understand why the link quality is low. If only they can connect to another router nearby that has excellent lqi, I would be happy. The rest of the network in my house is pretty solid; I have not seen nodes jumping around to different parents in many days. I do see LQI go up and down due to interference but the connections remain constant.
You should be able to force a router to connect to another router with the “permit join” dropdown. Don’t choose “all” choose the router you want it to connect to.
@tom_l - Thanks. I’m aware of that feature, and have been using that to force the end-devices to join a certain router. But when doing that to a router to force it to join another router, it just doesn’t work; it always ends up connecting to the coordinator.
For routers I use Xiaomi SP-EUC01, TuYa TS011F_plug_1, TS0207_repeater, TS011F and TS0505B.
I don’t recall that I done anything special to it, just paired them and let them decide how will they connect to network.