41–44 of 44 posts
MANETs: back from the dead!? The problem is not the hardware, but the software; apparently, nobody can think of a killer application.
Meshtastic has been popular, but relies upon a terrible implementation of a mesh -- and it's vastly oversold on its capabilities. I understand some hams run a meshtastic repeater primarily to convince meshtastic users to become hams.
MANET is one of the protocols I was involved in implementing for a certain network protocol suite back around 2012. Mesh routing protocols only work for the most limited of use cases. They don't know about the capacity of the underlying wireless network and basically fall apart when things are congested or there are radios with poor reception. QoS is implemented far better in modern cell phone networks, and if the ro…
Interesting! If someone with a math background (but not a CS background) wanted to dig deep into learning about mesh networking protocol theory - do you have any recommendations for learning resources or places to get started? I've long imagined that a content centric mesh network approach would be a better starting point than what we've built up currently, but it seems like such a deep and mysterious subject and I h…
I had other friends back in the early 2000s working on WiMax, and the hardest part of their work was getting QoS right. More recently (still 10+ years ago), another friend implemented a TCP proxy for a major cell phone provider in the US that used a more wireless friendly congestion control protocol on the wireless network side of things as regular TCP breaks down when latency increases due to reception issues (which gets interpreted as congestion and triggers retransmits). Since the cellular base stations ensured that the wireless network was effectively lossless (albeit with periods of much higher latency), performance for end users increased substantially when the bulk of the TCP retransmits were suppressed.
There's a huge gap between making wireless work vs making it work well. For me, 5G is a step backwards as all the tricks used to push for higher data rates (like larger QAM constellations) make everything worse in rural areas with poor reception: there just isn't a good enough SNR 99% of the time for the new shiny, and the increased power usage does nothing other than drain my phone's battery faster than it did with older LTE. But that is where all the money for research is today.
Wireless is complicated.
Ever since 802.11ah devices started appearing I've thought it would be perfect for partnering inside wireless IP cameras... and hell, make them mesh together with something like this so each one configured on your network extends the range of the others in it's area. Streaming 720P H265 is easily doable at the speeds the networks achieve for a few cameras, and the range would be perfect for perimeter monitoring most…
MANET is one of the protocols I was involved in implementing for a certain network protocol suite back around 2012. Mesh routing protocols only work for the most limited of use cases. They don't know about the capacity of the underlying wireless network and basically fall apart when things are congested or there are radios with poor reception. QoS is implemented far better in modern cell phone networks, and if the ro…
Interesting! If someone with a math background (but not a CS background) wanted to dig deep into learning about mesh networking protocol theory - do you have any recommendations for learning resources or places to get started? I've long imagined that a content centric mesh network approach would be a better starting point than what we've built up currently, but it seems like such a deep and mysterious subject and I h…
If you're talking about fast and low latency connection then look into existing meshes, almost every popular mesh has some sort of paper describing how it works.