With mesh networking, the distance between two nodes does not matter as long as there are enough nodes in between to pass the message along. When one node wants to communicate with another, ZigBee automatically calculates the best path. A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. If a node can no longer operate, for example because it has been removed from the network or because a barrier blocks its ability to communicate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, either directly or through intermediate nodes.