Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
As the original author of that documentation, it's quite entertaining to have it quoted back to me. :-) In any case the routing "prefers" links labelled as the internet when there is a tiebreak between two peerings between the same pair of nodes, i.e. you are connected to some other device via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth simultaneously.
And while it is true that Pinecone cannot necessarily always make the best routing decision based on public keys alone, aggressive queue management attempts to provide the best QoS for all flows and it scales very well because nodes maintain only a small amount of state about their position in the spanning tree and their position in the SNEK. Importantly, shortcuts can and often are taken when Pinecone switches to tree-based routing as the geometric distance to the destination on the tree is evaluated at each hop. Routing "by the SNEK" is used primarily to find the remote node and as a fallback in case the tree routing fails.
[1] https://github.com/mwarning/meshnet-lab [2] https://pinecone.matrix.org or https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone/tree/main/cmd/pinecon...