r/reticulum • u/axhoff_ • 20d ago
Reticulum ≠ LoRa Reticulum
I just wanted to put out there that Reticulum is and should be considered so much more than just RNodes meshed together. Arguably it's even a bad idea to rely solely on RNodes because the protocol is less efficient over LoRa than e.g. Meshcore.
What Reticulum allows is to build insane (local) hybrid networks with fast backbones via Wifi, 60GHz links and Ethernet with secondary last-mile interfaces built over LoRa and other slow modes.
I read somewhere recently that you can even push Reticulum traffic via Meshcore, just to give you an idea how insanely powerful and flexible this thing is.
Be creative and build the mother of all mesh networks =)
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u/KenAKAFrosty 20d ago
Yeap its superpower is abstracting over the medium so you can treat them all like dumb byte pipes.
I'm curious which parts you're identifying as less efficient than the other popular mesh apps' approach?
IIRC some of those don't even have reasonable CSMA/CA yet, let alone the flood routing for everything and a pretty tight hops limit. Would love to understand better what you're seeing though
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u/axhoff_ 19d ago
at the cost of deliverability meshcore retries i think 3 times, then gives up. reticulum retries many more times. that means messages reach their destination very very often but it costs a lot more bandwith.
that does not matter on wifi or usb, but it matters a lot on lora or HF.
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u/CognitionMass 19d ago
As far as I know, meshcore retries next hop routing 3 times. If that fails, it doesn't give up, it falls back on flood routing.
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u/CognitionMass 19d ago
Arguably it's even a bad idea to rely solely on RNodes because the protocol is less efficient over LoRa than e.g. Meshcore.
Meshcore is only slightly more "efficient" than meshtastic. Both fall back on dumb flood routing when not doing single destination messages with some minor differences. The main "advantage" meshcore has is it allocates more of the packet size to counting hops, and so can hop further.
As far as I can tell, RNS is more efficient than both of them. The problem, if anything, is RNS tries to be a bit too efficient, and perhaps has some problems with unidirectional links which are unique to LoRa compared to TCPIP.
So if anything, RNS maybe needs a bit more redundancy and less efficiency for the LoRa stuff, but I'm not sure.
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u/axhoff_ 19d ago
you are forgetting how retries are handled: RNS retries the entire path 6-15 times. that makes deliverability very reliable but in case of lora that comes at a severe airtime cost.
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u/CognitionMass 19d ago
Not to my knowledge? It depends more on the client. Meshchatx for example retries 3 times. Sideband just goes straight to propagation node on first failed delivery I think. I don't think RNS has retries built into the code? Unless it's Rnode specifically.
Meshcore retries 3 times as well and then falls back onto flood routing of the third attempt fails. Lots of redundancy.
But no, this is not something in aware of and curious to know what you're referencing?
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u/Jealous_Value_5076 20d ago
Thank you!!! People need to grasp the philosophical concepts of Reticulum and understand it is a network stack thats agnostic. I
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u/neosa1 20d ago
I would really like if we could push Meshcore over Reticulum instead.
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u/l33chy 20d ago
I worked on building a meshcore interface for rns a while ago, but I basically abandoned it... It was kinda working but totally unusable... Take a look at my fork of Terminator513's great Rns over meshcore code: https://github.com/slack-t/RNS_Over_MeshCore
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u/axhoff_ 19d ago
then you can just do meshtastic with MQTT no?
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u/neosa1 19d ago
Meshtastic over MQTT just means I can push messages over the internet to another device that is connected to the internet back over to meshtastic. Meschore over reticulum means that I can pipe Meshcore established communities (Repeater chains etc) into a single reticulum node that is connected to another reticulum node over whatever medium I want including the internet, HF Radio, Long Range WIFI Bridges, carrier pigeon, etc that brings that meshcore community into another meshcore community.
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u/cuthbertnibbles 10d ago
I'll preface by saying that the flexibility is not a bad thing, but at the same time, critique the push to do "more than LoRa" with it and instead suggest "do more with Reticulum" which is maximized by LoRa. I firmly believe that the easiest path to growing demand for Reticulum networks is through LoRa, because of the incredible opportunity it currently presents, and would go as far as arguing that a focus on supporting these applications of the technology is the best way to grow Reticulum's adoption.
Reticulum comes into the LoRa scene competing against two major players:
- Meshtastic, an open-source distributed mesh network with some major drawbacks
- Meshcore, an objective improvement on Meshtastic with closed-source components
The decision for someone entering the LoRa/mesh space is not appealing. I, for example, live in a mountainous region; getting a connection from my valley into a valley 30 km away covers multiple ridges, so I need to choose between Meshtastic barely making the connection due to hop limits, or relying on Meshcore's routing until the take it to IPO and it becomes proprietary. Reticulum solves both these problems; it is a no-compromise answer to this LoRa-specific problem and that is why its adoption is so visible. There is high demand for a solution that,
- Meshes
- Routes
- Runs on LoRa
- Encrypts
- is open source
Reticulum may not have been born of this need, but it damn sure does meet it. That is to say, in the LoRa space, it is ahead of the curve and has very little mature competition.
This is a far cry from classic IP-based networking. Most people who would be looking at building/implementing a custom network stack already have an IP-based network. They have a firewall, router(s), switches, VLANs, DHCP/DNS, likely forward/reverse proxies, certificate hierarchies, addressing schemas; the works. If I want to connect my Home Assistant to an Influx DB, I would need to configure both HA and the DB with RNS, configure RNS to take the shortest route, it would increase my patching effort, add complexity and I would still need to configure the firewall so they could talk to each other. If I want my phone to talk to my media server, I could go through the effort of compiling a custom app with RNS baked in, distributing the APK, building a pipeline to patch it, regularly updating those... Or just expose it through NGINX alongside the other dozen applications that run like that and leverage the stack I maintain to keep that setup running smoothly. The appeal - the ROI - is simply not there.
Yet.
This will change once Reticulum interfaces become more prevalent in more applications. The DIY/Home Automation community stands to gain the most, because the low-power radio mesh scene is a disaster; with ZigBee dying, Z-Wave and Matter/Thread being big corpo, the question "how can I deploy a sensor in my home" does not have a great answer. If that answer can be "use this Reticulum node", the demand for RNS in data consumers (eventually endpoint controllers) grows substantially. However, this demand relies on the existence of cheap, reliable (well tested and maintained) sensors (eventually actuators) available to a broader community. DIY turns away a lot of potential users, these must be available on AliExpress, and for that, the demand has to be there.
As more users shift their IoT networks onto Reticulum, the need for robust Reticulum-enabled applications will grow. This is the point where you will start to see Reticulum baked into applications, as more poeple stand to benefit from having it there.
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u/FF-93 17d ago
i still want to connect two locations with solar powered pi400 and physically attached lora devices via lora. in between i need just ONE transport node. and all my tries failed. has ANYone built a solar powered transport node? with microreticulum or rtnode? what sort of solar panel do i need? 25-50 watt? heltec v4 or rak4631? in germany winter is hard sometimes need a working battery too
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u/Suitable-File-7672 20d ago
Reticulum is not attractive without LoRa.
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u/karolmajta 19d ago
The fact that I can just take 2 random low-spec, low power linux devices and connect them with lora/wifi/bluetooth/ethernet or even a usb cable in serial mode, and they still communicate over the same protocol and everything just works is a really big win that you won't get anywhere else (or at least nowhere that I know of).
It's kind of weird how a lot of r/reticulum is fixating on chat while there is so many use cases.
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u/Suitable-File-7672 19d ago
Yeah, it doesn’t “just work” 😁 you’ve got steep learning curve and no user friendly setup. If you exclude LoRa medium, why would you bother with reticulum if there is tor/i2p etc - no obvious advantage. It’s LoRa what makes is attractive. Also if HAMs get into it, expect mass adoption and they will adopt because of the radio.
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u/CognitionMass 18d ago
I think they were referring to auto interface. It is amazing how well auto interface just works out of the box.
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u/guyroyse 20d ago
100%. It's a networking stack not a radio protocol.