Hey there @Clem73188, welcome back to the forums!
This is a pretty intense project, it’s great to see so many community members helping out!
From a feasibility standpoint, it seems like the desired outcome is well within the capabilities of the RPi platform. I understand your concerns given the project’s scale, and there are a few things I think are worth considering before you start.
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You mentioned the containers acting as semi-Faraday Cages, this could be highly beneficial if the labs are physically close given that the intra-lab communication is done via ethernet, it may well reduce interference from other labs.
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You mentioned you want the PicoWs to have individual static IP addresses. I fear this type of solution will be “clunky”, for lack of a better term. I imagine it will also be quite annoying to expand the system were you to increase the size in future. That being said, I understand your reasoning given you want each PicoW to both send and receive packets. It would be worth looking into other solutions, such as software network multiplexers.
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I have seen both TCP and UDP mentioned within the thread. Given the desired high data transfer rate I am of the opinion that UDP is the better choice here (which I believe was the protocol @Clem73188 mentioned in the original post), especially if you were to use a solution like a multiplexer mentioned above, which may increase the size of the data packets (SoF/EoF destination info, etc.).
Keep in mind these are just concerns that came to mind while reading the thread. At the end of the day complex networking like this often comes with many minor complications. I’ll keep this in mind and update the thread if I come up with any solutions in the coming days.
Hoping this helped, and good luck with the project!
