Heh, I walked a similar path ~7 years ago. Wanted to get started developing a mesh network routing algorithm that could handle a hundred hops, got distracted and built a mesh networking test harness / simulation system instead (<a href="https://github.com/pirate/mesh-networking" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pirate/mesh-networking</a>).<p>Never got around to finishing a full routing algorithm, though we did have a lot of fun testing wacky network topologies and protocols that solved subsets of the problem.<p>The closest we came was designing a 2 or 3 tiered system, where nodes self-arrange into clusters of up to 256 nodes with one elected leader to coordinate. The routing table is replicated on all nodes (eventually consistent), but the leader handles all changes. Then there's Layer 2 routing between clusters with a similar leader election system to handle inter-cluster routing.<p>We tried to figure out a way to make the routing stateless, (e.g. by encoding a node's position in the graph in its id, sort of like a phone number has a country code, then area code, etc.), but stopped working on it before figuring out a good approach for broadcasting ID changes without flooding the network with broadcast traffic beyond small network sizes.<p>Nowadays there are established mesh routing algorithms that solve all these problems (like B.A.T.M.A.N., Contiki, 802.11s, or even BGP), but it's still a really exciting field that I dream of working in professionally someday.<p><a href="https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki" rel="nofollow">https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki</a>
I feel the article ended before it started.<p>Did they find anything? What are some interesting rules of thumb? Is there any theory you can draw about long path networks?
Most wireless networks seem to have loss in the range 0.1% - 1% due to congestion (ie. when a packet is clobbered by noise of some far off transmitter that the media access control algorithms could not protect against).<p>In that case, Layer 2 retransmission (ie. retransmission at an individual link rather than needing to retransmit a packet across the entire route) becomes absolutely necessary if there are many wireless links on a route.<p>What systems use layer 2 retransmission? My home wifi does not seem to...
PJON supports mesh networking too, it is open-source and free to use, check it out: <a href="https://github.com/gioblu/PJON" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gioblu/PJON</a><p>its address space may be beneficial (more flexible, lower overhead) for many use cases.
What are some of the biggest public/private wireless mesh networks out there? (I suppose 'biggest' by measure of node count -- or maybe area covered?). For those networks, how deep are they in practice? 100 hops seems unrealstic, but a great way to find scaling problems.