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Mesh networking has theoretical limits that guarantee that normal internet will beat it by a mile.
by mahyarm 10y ago
Mesh networking has theoretical limits that guarantee that normal internet will beat it by a mile.
- 3131s 10y agoI am curious to learn more about this if anyone has a recommendation for a paper or two to read.
- einarvollset 10y agoThis is probably the most widely cited one: http://circuit.ucsd.edu/~massimo/Papers_files/Capacity-Physical-TIT.pdf http://circuit.ucsd.edu/~massimo/Papers_files/Capacity-Physi...
- gravypod 10y agoMesh networking just revolves around the idea that computers can be linked. If mesh networks have theoretical limits then the internet has them as well. Mesh networking is a collection of multiple technologies in its ideal form.
- woah 10y agoThis gets at the heart of the matter: "mesh networking" means a bunch of different things. It started out meaning a network composed of mobile devices with omnidirectional antennas, running an ad-hoc routing protocol. This is probably why OP said it has limits, as such a network will be slow and lose a lot of bandwidth with every hop. These days, it's mostly a phrase used when people are excited about networking technologies.
- lrem 10y agoMesh networks have some practical limits they are unlikely to overcome, like crossing an ocean, or any sufficiently large unpopulated area. You do need expensive dedicated infrastructure for that.
- gravypod 10y agoNothing about that is a physical limitation of linking computers. That's a limitation of a specific type of linking computers. There is nothing that says people couldn't lay cable down on the Atlanitc to cross the pond. Nothing about that has to do with the concept of the network being made up of linked computers. That has everything to do with how they are linked.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoDo you mean "wireless" and "wired" or is there something specific to the mesh vs trunk topology?
- cperciva 10y agoNot sure that that user was referring to; but yes, there is a specific topological problem: Routing tables. With current internet topology, only a small number of nodes need to know how to route to everywhere; most nodes simply forward 99.9% of addresses to their default "upstream" router. Since the vast majority of nodes are not able to keep global routing tables (both because they lack the storage, and also because they lack the bandwidth needed to keep such tables up to date) you have two choices: 1. A subset of nodes are "supernodes" which know how to get anywhere (aka. our current internet topology), or 2. Addresses carry enough semantic meaning to allow nodes to guess which way to forward them (e.g., "I don't know who this packet is going to, but it's somewhere in San Francisco"). That second option would require a complete renumbering of the Internet, and it's still not clear that it would work; purely geographic routing would result in packets from Plymouth to New York getting stuck at Land's End because they want to go West but the cables all land East of there. Note: This problem doesn't exist with small mesh networks, because for small networks you can have every node maintain a copy of the entire routing table.
- colordrops 10y agoWould it not be possible to build a distributed routing table?
- cperciva 10y agoIt might be, but you'd need to be smarter than me.
- ouid 10y agohere's a simple (very bad) example of distributed routing. Addresses are simply bitstrings of some length. If my address is a=a1a2...an, I need to store the first segment of the shortest path to each r_1=a'1a2...an, r_2=a1a'2...an all the way up to r_n=a1a2...a'2, where a'k != ak (i.e. all the addresses with a hamming distance of exactly 1 from me). I then simply route a message with an address b=b1b2...bn to r_i where i is the first non-zero bit of a xor b.
- djsumdog 10y agoI worked with a sensor network team years ago. I think back then the largest mesh networks were only about 200 nodes (I think it was a French University, but I'd have to go back to our notes). I'm sure it's improved by now. There are some very difficult limits when you try to route traffic where everyone has the same bandwidth. This is why we have trunk lines and undersea fibre cables.
- hvidgaard 10y agoThat is exactly the issue. Either we need deteministic authoritative lookup and routing, or we need a yet undiscovered routing algorithm and network topology.
- bbcbasic 10y agoYou can order a pizza in 1kb of data and a 10 second latency would be no problem. Pizza web site can be cached.
- hvidgaard 10y agoCurrent best widely used distributed topology is Kademlia, and it contacts O(log n) nodes in a search. With 1.000.000 nodes that is 20kb of data. With 1.000.000.000 it's 30kb of data. That is fine for simple messaging. But once have located a large ressource you need, and you start to transfer data, at say 10mbit/s, you use 10mbit/s for every node from source to destination. It doesn't scale with trafic. I haven't followed the state of the art that close in a few years, so there might have been some improvements, but none that have made much fuss.
- kpil 10y agoThere is probably more than one route between two points, in a tightly connected mesh. But I agree, it gets insanely complicated rather quickly.
- kefka 10y agoBut you're assuming sending data is 100% unique and arbitrary. We know with newer algorithms like IPFS that complex datastreams can be broken down into 256kB chunks all each individually hashed. Not only that, but most data is shared traffic. Yourtube, Facebook, software, you name it. Most unique data people create is textural or small, not the 10MB/s canard.
- hvidgaard 10y agoThat require a lot of caching. People needs to be villing to dedicate many GB to this cache around the network for it to be effective.
- kefka 10y agoThere's 2 levels of caching in IPFS. Persistent and temporary. Persistent is when you pin something, or add something (which pins it). It's stuck in block storage until you run a command to remove it. Temporary is when you go to some IPFS site, and download stuff to your cache. This is the same thing as your browser cache. In IPFS, there's a garbage collector that circle around every time you hit 10GB (or whatever you set it to). What that means, is some content that goes viral ends up being supported by everyone going to said content. I know I don't clean my browser cache every few minutes, or really ever. And if that means that my and others connections are sped up because of that, the better.
- lend000 10y agoThis is not true. Any network topology, including the present-day Internet, can be considered a subset of a mesh network topology.
- hvidgaard 10y agoAnd it works because there is capacity where it is needed, and the network is deterministic with authoritative lookup services. Even if everyone had 100/100mbit and we use a mesh network with a relatively efficient topology, with say random walkers to find ressources, it will wouldn't scale well enough.
- vertex-four 10y agoA mesh network with an incentive system could provide incentive for building out infrastructure where it's needed, without our existing oligopolies over the last mile. In other words - if you were to pay each of the nodes your packets pass through, you'd have competition where absolutely anyone could hook into the network at any point and provide the necessary bandwidth and get paid for it, no permission necessary.
- mahyarm 10y agoThats the current internet with a twist, which means wires, which mean land rights, regulations and large telecom competition.
- vertex-four 10y agoThe point is that your last mile can be a proper meshnet, and the backbone operates in real-time competition, and people wanting to compete on parts of the backbone are much more able to - and people wanting to compete in the last mile are able to as well. You could have someone pull fiber from the backbone to somewhere vaguely near you, and depend on the meshnet from there, or you could travel a few kilometers over meshnet hops, or some combination of the two depending on whether a packet relates to something user-interactive. It solves a problem - monopolies in Internet transport - it just doesn't handwave away basic understandings of physics.
- kwhitefoot 10y agoSurely the whole point of ARPAnet was that it was a mesh so that there would always be multiple routes from A to B. This is necessary to make the network fault tolerant. If it isn't a mesh it is not a network just a tree.
- metaphorm 10y agothe ARPAnet backbone is a mesh. the "last mile" ISP networks are trees. what we have now is a hybrid system. a pure mesh system in those last mile networks is not feasible at scale, unfortunately. traffic congestion, hardware interoperability, and meshnet protocol latency become overwhelming when the number of users rises.
- dredmorbius 10y agoCitation requested.
- wslh 10y agoYes, it is like thinking you can implement a service like Twitter in a distributed way. You can, but you loose some of its properties like performing analytics over all the messages in real time. It is important to first apply basic computer science theories before trying to invent a perpetual motion machine.
- mirimir 10y ago> You can, but you loose some of its properties like performing analytics over all the messages in real time. That seems like a feature :) Why do I want my messages to be available for analysis?
- wslh 10y ago> Why do I want my messages to be available for analysis? So I think you already have a lot of options for that.
- pdimitar 10y agoThe thing is, many of us don't care if Twitter has our messages for analysis. That's their problem, not ours. Marketing needs shouldn't hamper technical progress.
- norea-armozel 10y agoIt's likely that the mesh network would be combined with the wired network where if you need to contact someone much further away it will seek them out across what we designate today as the Internet. But mesh networks will fill in the local and regional communications role as time goes on. It's an inevitability as we keep utilizing smart phones, tablets, and laptops.