Before digging into programming with ESP8266 I would like to ask some key questions. I would like to have a network of possibly 1000+ nodes (closer to the idea of IoT -- Internet of Things, I guess), but I do NOT want to create a mesh/manet network.
That is too much for single access point (AP) to handle, but what could help is usage of any way of standard/custom TDMA network. Let's say most naive approach is to make 10 devices to wake up each minute, establish association, do action and then return to sleep. If we have 20 of such devices then we will require 50 rounds for 1 minute, thus during one hour we make one cycle of connection (reduction of awake time reduces total cycle time).
Making AP association is quite complex and slow process takes seconds (up to 10), and this limits from below time of one one wake up round. actually a waste of resources as we rarely need to talk to devices and association to device is really not such important. What is important is whether we need to establish connection in first place or not. That is known to device (obviously) and AP, and AP can broadcast some information over local network to ask for connection establishment.
So the question here: is it possible to retrieved broadcast messages without active association to AP (we can forget about security for now, just plain messages on 255.255.255)?