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Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

meshtastic.org

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Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#61

Post by toomuchtodo »

eql5 wrote: post #52
danesparza wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that LoRA isn't high bandwidth -- so just out of curiosity, what kinds of things did you use this for?

The official meshtastic app can only transmit text messages (max ~230 characters) plus location data (GPS). Optionally it can also transmit sensor data (see RAK WisBlock devices, where you can add sensors for temperature, humidity, air quality).

Can the mesh control plane be orchestrated/monitored/bridged by out of band comms like cellular IP or StarLink?

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#62

Post by neilalexander »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #60
neilalexander wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more state-of-the-art routing protocols working to solve this problem for mesh networks. A couple examples of projects I have been involved in: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone

I don't know if I consider those the same thing as they're not fully wireless meshes. They'll use the internet when possible, so it wouldn't be an off-grid network. And without internet, it won't scale. So if you're using internet anyways, at high-density locations like a college campus, just deploy more wireless APs in the area instead of building an inefficient wireless mesh network. The wireless mesh part of those…

To be clear, neither Yggdrasil nor Pinecone have any concept of “the Internet”. A peering over the Internet is fundamentally the same as a local peering taking place over something like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and they are not treated preferentially or handled differently.

Both protocols are also designed with mobility events in mind and measure far better than many other routing protocols on route convergence in highly mobile environments.

Also interpret “stream-oriented and reliable” as link-layer characteristics, i.e. a peering over TCP even if it is link-local satisfies these requirements. Not “reliable” as in “never goes away”.

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#63

Post by ThatPlayer »

neilalexander wrote: post #62
ThatPlayer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I consider those the same thing as they're not fully wireless meshes. They'll use the internet when possible, so it wouldn't be an off-grid network. And without internet, it won't scale. So if you're using internet anyways, at high-density locations like a college campus, just deploy more wireless APs in the area instead of building an inefficient wireless mesh network. The wireless mesh part of those…

To be clear, neither Yggdrasil nor Pinecone have any concept of “the Internet”. A peering over the Internet is fundamentally the same as a local peering taking place over something like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and they are not treated preferentially or handled differently. Both protocols are also designed with mobility events in mind and measure far better than many other routing protocols on route convergence in highly m…

Do you have any examples of their mobility event handling? I'm reading the documentation for Pinecone and don't see much. Even Pinecone says Yggdrasil's spanning tree isn't good enough: "However, the spanning tree topology alone is not a suitable routing scheme for highly dynamic networks." [0]

I'm reading that as why Pinecone has the virtual snake topology. But they define that as a public key-based routing, which doesn't take into account optimal routing in the network. Nodes are ordered by public key [1]. It's good for P2P mesh, not wireless offgrid meshes.

And their SNEK routing does prefer the internet over Bluetooth [2]:

> we can further refine the path to use either the faster or lower latency link type to route to that peer:

> If the Best candidate has a slower peer connection type (Multicast > Remote > Bluetooth) than the connected peer

[0] https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone#does-pinecone-work-on...

[1] https://matrix-org.github.io/pinecone/snake

[2] https://matrix-org.github.io/pinecone/virtual_snake/nexthop

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#64

Post by gh02t »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #61
eql5 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official meshtastic app can only transmit text messages (max ~230 characters) plus location data (GPS). Optionally it can also transmit sensor data (see RAK WisBlock devices, where you can add sensors for temperature, humidity, air quality).

Can the mesh control plane be orchestrated/monitored/bridged by out of band comms like cellular IP or StarLink?

Yes to all of these, there is a managed mode where nodes are controlled via commands from a command channel. Bridging networks is done via MQTT so you can use virtually any transport.

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#65

Post by bronco21016 »

Hugsun wrote: post #17

Has anyone deployed and used a system like this here? If so, what was its purpose and why this technology over others?

I just bought two LilyGo TTGO T-Echo devices. My plan is to experiment with them on snowmobiles. The ability to be slightly separated (a few km) but still send location and brief messages will be handy deep in the woods where cell coverage is very spotty.

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#66

Post by toomuchtodo »

gh02t wrote: post #64
toomuchtodo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the mesh control plane be orchestrated/monitored/bridged by out of band comms like cellular IP or StarLink?

Yes to all of these, there is a managed mode where nodes are controlled via commands from a command channel. Bridging networks is done via MQTT so you can use virtually any transport.

Thank you!

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#67

Post by voakbasda »

datadeft wrote: post #22
Hugsun wrote: post #17

Has anyone deployed and used a system like this here? If so, what was its purpose and why this technology over others?

Yes. We use it to have a backup communication channel when all other networks are down. This is an extremely unlikely scenario. If that happens wireless communication is going to be the least of the problems.

Another Carringron scale event is not only likely, it’s virtually inevitable. Whether it happens in our lifetime remains to be seen, but it would fry much of our communication infrastructure. The status quo is much more fragile than it appears.

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#68

Post by r14c »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #59
fsmv wrote: post #54

It says it only scales to 80 nodes, so sounds like you won't find a mesh to join unless you make it yourself and it can only be people you know. I want a global mesh network to replace the internet

Me too. I think the way forward--at least for now--is not large meshes, but partition tolerant apps. A search for "Is Taco Express open right now?" should not resolve a globally unique name to a globally unique address and then ask some distant server which will then ask for your location info so that it can figure out which taco express you mean. That's so fragile. Instead the search should propagate through whichev…

honestly i think the main obstacle to global mesh is the lack of a good business case, which is pretty intrinsic to the format. mesh makes it possible to remove almost all intermediaries, so its difficult to position a company in a place where they can capture a significant portion of the generated value. even though a global self-organizing comms network can clearly be seen as a net good. which is basically an echo of the funding issues present in many critical open source components. there are some arguments to be made for cryptocurrency in this space, but for a nascent physical network the value proposition at first will be very small. a VC/startup could try to get into this space, but once the cat is out of the bag it would be very easy to bypass the artificial billing mechanism to create a rogue free mesh using a similar protocol.

of course, this doesn't include the very real technical challenges of building a scalable mesh protocol. which are nontrivial in themselves.

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#69

Post by pr8dan »

antirez wrote: post #42

Related: https://github.com/antirez/freakwan/ Disclaimer: I'm the author. The concept is similar to Meshtastic, but the goal was to make more documented and clear choices at protocol level, to have a much simpler to hack and adapt implementation, and so forth. If you happen to understand Italian, I gave a talk about it here: https://talks.codemotion.com/introduzione-alla-tecnologia-rf...

Any views/comparison regarding freakwan versus reticulum https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum ?

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#70

Post by immibis »

fsmv wrote: post #54

It says it only scales to 80 nodes, so sounds like you won't find a mesh to join unless you make it yourself and it can only be people you know. I want a global mesh network to replace the internet

The internet is already the global mesh network. It turns out one individual contributes nothing, compared to a 1000km 10000Gbps fiber link that costs millions of dollars to lay. But nobody is actually stopping you from getting ports at two DCs or IXes, somehow getting them connected to each other, then charging people to carry traffic between them. I got a price quote for about $800/month to carry 10Gbps 650km in Europe, so that's what you could potentially earn.
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