Edit: looks like the Reticulum Manual might have some more technical details. https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reti...
Edit: looks like the Reticulum Manual might have some more technical details. https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reti...
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.
"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.
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/
So, for instance, at the URL you referenced, it says at the bottom:
> As meshes grow larger and traffic becomes more contentious, the firmware will increase these intervals. This is in addition to duty cycle, channel, and air-time utilization throttling.
> Starting with version 2.4.0, the firmware will scale back Telemetry, Position, and other ancillary port traffic for meshes larger than 40 nodes (nodes seen in the past 2 hours) using the following algorithm:
> ScaledInterval = Interval * (1.0 + ((NumberOfOnlineNodes - 40) * 0.075))
> For example an active mesh of 62 nodes would scale back telemetry.device_update_interval to 79.5 minutes instead of the 30 minute default.
It looks like they are already building back-off strategies as the net scales, and that starts to happen at very low node counts (just 40). So, what happens when node counts hit 500 or 1000? Again, not trying to throw stones; just trying to understand how far these protocols can go and how they degrade/fail as they scale. Ideally, they don’t fall over and even possibly get more robust (with more nodes, there are typically more topological connections between nodes, which provides more possible paths and resiliency).
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.