Mesh-networking Alternatives

mesh-networking reviews and mentions

• What Happens Inside a 100-Hop IPv6 Wireless Mesh Network?
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2021

  Heh walked a similar path a few years ago. Wanted to get started developing a mesh network routing algorithm that could handle a hundred hops, got distracted and built a mesh networking test harness / simulation system instead (https://github.com/pirate/mesh-networking).

  Never got around to finishing a full routing algorithm, though we did have a lot of fun testing wacky network topologies and protocols that solved subsets of the problem.

  The closest we came was designing a 2 or 3 tiered system, where nodes self-arrange into clusters of up to 256 nodes with one elected leader to coordinate. The routing table is replicated on all nodes (eventually consistent), but the leader handles all changes. Then there's Layer 2 routing between clusters with a similar leader election system to handle inter-cluster routing.

  We tried to figure out a way to make the routing stateless, (e.g. by encoding a node's position in the graph in its id, sort of like a phone number has a country code, then area code, etc.), but stopped working on it before figuring out a good approach for broadcasting ID changes without flooding the network with broadcast traffic beyond small network sizes.

  Nowadays there are established mesh routing algorithms that solve all these problems (like B.A.T.M.A.N., 802.11s, or even BGP), but it's still a really exciting field that I dream of working in professionally someday.

  https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki