alt Hacker NewsI’ve looked at a few of the LoRa-based mesh network systems over the last couple months. They all seem to have a philosophical document of some sort, like this one, sometimes buried as part of the user docs, but none of them have clear protocol specification docs. When I look at their node maps, the node counts are absurdly small (like 20 nodes in a city of 1 million people). I suspect each of them has major scaling issues. Sure, mesh networks are great because they are more resilient, but if you trust nobody and you have no sense of a route to a destination, you’re left with flooding as your primary next-hop selection method, which means you’re going to be about as scalable as an old Microsoft LAN Manager network was in 1995 (which is to say not very). Short of reading the code, does any sort of protocol documentation (or better yet, analysis) exist for Reticulum?
Edit: looks like the Reticulum Manual might have some more technical details. https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reti...
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Reticulum has no bandwidth management. If your node or the whole local area is flooded with traffic from the rest of the network there is nothing you can do.
"Reticulum does not include source addresses on any packets" and with that you cannot throttle passing-through traffic based on source. Any hope of scaling is gone.
Meshtastic is the most popular in my area. I can see about 150 nodes from my house in a US county of ~300K (though actually being able to talk to most of those remains questionable).
I am certain the popularity of Meshtastic is down to how easy they have made it to onboard. Buy the module, flash using the web flasher, install the app on your phone, done. There's a Youtube tutorial on every street corner for this, even though I (and seemingly many people) don't find Meshtastic to be all that reliable.
For reference, this is what Meshtastic has to say about their flood-based mesh protocol: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/
Seattle is showing >400 nodes for meshcore: https://meshcore.co.uk/map.html
Reticulum is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-based" lmao. Typical hn comment.
Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ which are hidden at the very top of the git repo.
> but none of them have clear protocol specification docs
This is a big turn off for me. I have seen it for a number of protocols beyond mesh ones. ESP-Hosted does this too. So does ELRS. Maybe I'm too used to reading data sheets etc, but if your protocol requires a specific implementation, I am put off by the friction: I must integrate your software, in the language you used, and will likely hit compatibility problems as a result.