7 ms·

Why isn't mesh networking more popular?

33 points by riboflavin 12y ago

SapphireSun 12y ago
Has anyone worked with hybrid networks? I can see how the routing problem grows exponentially, but what if you keep everything to a few hops to a node that offloads the traffic to a more traditional system? It could be a good way to extend network range while reducing infrastructure.
- oakwhiz 12y ago
  I think this is what 802.11s is intended for.
- bdickason 12y ago
  This is the approach I've been thinking of. Launching a mesh in a specific area near a backbone provider where you could cut a deal for reasonable internet connectivity. As the mesh expands, users (in theory) pay less and less, especially as more backbone nodes are connected.
Paul_S 12y ago
Looking at trends like that is pointless. Interest in anything technical will decrease because more non-technical people become connected and the Internet reflects that. I bet there is more people (absolute numbers) interested today than in 2005. Do you think the percentage of technical people will increase over time? In the same way that almost no one was literate 1000 years ago which is now reversed.
gsteinb88 12y ago
Very long story short, the overhead in maintaining the link state information in meshed networks swamps the available bandwidth for even modest (think 20-40) numbers of nodes. Basically, as nodes are constantly moving/coming on- and off-line, nodes have to know which nodes are in the connection graph, so they exchange that information. But that eats up all of the bandwidth amazingly quickly, leaving no room for actual traffic. There are some other issues with meshed networks (latency, battery usage when you're just a client node, etc.), but especially for those of the kind described/dreamed about here (which are also known as MANETS -- mobile ad-hoc networks), the routing issue is a huge one. Finally, I should note the above isn't just academic; several companies have tried to build products based on these kinds of networks -- military contractors being one of note -- and have pretty much come up short. So until the really fundamental issues are worked out, which is in the realm of academic research, not implementation, we probably aren't going to see anything like this.
- robinhoode 12y ago
  Do you have any more information on this? I'm definitely curious what the problem looks like when stated in specific algorithmic terms (big-O and all that).
- riboflavin 12y ago
  This is really interesting. Thanks for this comment. So is something like Multipeer Connectivity Framework in existence mostly because it is a much weaker version of true mesh networking? (Or not mesh networking at all?) Do you think weaker versions of mesh networking that don't solve the underlying problems could also be valuable?
  - yohanatan 12y ago
    You're accepting his defeatist attitude too quickly. The problems he lists are easily surmountable. The military uses mesh networking to a great degree of success. A globally-distributed up-to-date copy of the network topology is a faulty starting point.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wilecoyote 12y ago
  Doesn't Sonos employ some type of mesh-based network? It appears to work reasonably well in practice, but not sure whether it is in fact a better alternative to current standard wifi alternatives. Anyone happen to know more about this?
- ilaksh 12y ago
  That's not some academics problem. Its an engineering problem. What those companies have proven is that given the particular approach they took and the constraints they had they could not make their mesh networks work. So the starting point for an engineer is what types of mesh networks work that don't need to globally broadcast topology updates in real time. It always amazes me how quick people are to accept someone else's incorrect approach to a problem or to dismiss a new paradigm because others havent had success. Meanwhile they spend enormous amounts of energy tweaking the parameters of an outdated paradigm to try to make it work a little longer. The main thing holding back new superior approaches to a problem solution is always the people who tried and failed and then kept saying it was unworkable thus preventing others from trying.
dvanduzer 12y ago
There are different tradeoffs when you're talking about a mesh based on physical topology versus the logical mesh of a DHT. I think we'll see some rapid advancements as Van Jacobson's NDN[0] and Miller's telehash[1] reach maturity. [0] http://named-data.net/ http://named-data.net/ [1] https://github.com/telehash/telehash.org/blob/master/background.md https://github.com/telehash/telehash.org/blob/master/backgro...
sciurus 12y ago
Good timing for a mesh networking post, since this year's WirelessBattleMesh starts tomorrow. "The Wireless Battle of the Mesh is an event that aims at bringing together people from across the world to test the performance of different routing protocols for ad-hoc networks, like Babel, B.A.T.M.A.N., BMX, OLSR, 802.11s and Static Routing." http://battlemesh.org/ http://battlemesh.org/
privong 12y ago
The article states, "Perhaps most importantly, the idea of mesh networking seems to be a fit with our current trend toward decentralization..." I think this isn't really an accurate statement. The examples given in the article (Uber, airbnb, bitcoin) could reasonably be called "decentralized" (though, one could argue that in a case like airbnb, the fact that you go through a company means it isn't actually decentralized), but on the whole, I'd say the trend, for the bulk of the population, is actually towards more centralization. Think Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. More people are storing their data in fewer places, so I think the trend is the opposite of what the author states. In that sense, it's not at all surprising that mesh networking is not popular.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Probably because right now at least, there's little incentive in keeping nodes up. OpenLibernet and Skycoin are trying to change that: http://www.openlibernet.org/ http://www.openlibernet.org/ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0
andreasvc 12y ago
I believe the answer is that it is basically a pipe dream. For some reason, these sorts of ideas infect people with breathless enthusiasm. Telcos won't be necessary anymore, the reliability will be so much better, etc. Of course the reality is different. There are technical reasons for this, such as mentioned in another comment, but what I also think is important is the human factor. People would have to be convinced to administer their mesh nodes, and of course there are network effects here (there's really only a point to this if there's a critical mass, at least around you). When you think of the average user what they really want is to pay some nominal fee to ensure that the maintenance of their uplink is Somebody Else's Problem--they don't want to reconfigure their mesh node just to check facebook &c.
rolleiflex 12y ago
Disclaimer: I'm creator of a mesh network, or a decentralised, anonymous 'reddit' called Aether.[0] [1] I'm probably biased. The main problem with these networks is not the declining user interest per se, it's rather that they are by their own nature, a) very hard to engineer, and b) almost impossible to monetise. The engineering effort required to make a decentralised network reach resilience (and visible uptime) of the most basic Rails web app on Heroku is orders of magnitude away from just hosting it. For A, Decentralisation is a cruel mistress; every assumption you will make about computers connecting to your network will slowly fall apart as you move deeper into the architecture, engineering and design of your services—that makes it a fascinating challenge as much as a hard one fortunately. On the more unfortunate side, you eventually end up with cases that require you to entirely reëngineer your stack to provide for them; and not providing them access is philosophically against the democratic access decentralisation offers. For starters, anything higher than C/C++ is probably a non–starter, a lesson I learned the hard way. My own work is built in Python and getting it to perform adequately well on even most medium–grade computers has been a challenge. Distributed network means distributed loads, and there is a significant amount of computers who aren't able to pull their own weight on the Internet, especially in the developing world. It also means that you'll be bogged down with a lot of platform support issues, small bugs etc. For B, there are two issues. The first issue is that in a decentralised network it's almost impossible to target a specific person or entity to pay if you're not willing to create an exception for yourself (i.e. all computers able to call your servers, and consequently in absence of your servers the network goes down) but if you're willing to do that, you can just make it into a traditional system in the first place, and you just made it both subject to your whims, and as fragile as any other centralised service. That's a no-go. Beyond this, the moral imperative is that you shouldn't be charging for a service that doesn't cost you money to maintain. For additional services, sure, but you still need to figure out how to attach an additional service without which the core network continues to function. In general, it's a massive engineering task that isn't lucrative, and the effort required to maintain and keep functional increases exponentially as the network scales. For me, I'm stuck at packaging the new version for the last few months because PyInstaller doesn't like the way I split Aether into two applications—and you end up with these corner cases nobody on the entire Internet has ever encountered before. There's no Stack Overflow for that. It's fun, but it's also tiring. [0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be-a-reddit-for-the-privacy-conscious http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be... [1] http://www.getaether.net http://www.getaether.net
ronaldx 12y ago
The cellular network example depends on somewhere having a reliable, direct connection to the parent network. So, the need for a reliable, direct connection trumps the need for mesh networking. If you solve the problem of having a reliable, direct connection somewhere, it's more effective to extend that solution rather than also covering the problem of mesh networking.
im3w1l 12y ago
Wouldn't the latency be just awful if you connected to someone through lots of wifi hops?

33 points by riboflavin 12y ago

Has anyone worked with hybrid networks? I can see how the routing problem grows exponentially, but what if you keep everything to a few hops to a node that offloads the traffic to a more traditional system? It could be a good way to extend network range while reducing infrastructure.

oakwhiz 12y ago
I think this is what 802.11s is intended for.
bdickason 12y ago
This is the approach I've been thinking of. Launching a mesh in a specific area near a backbone provider where you could cut a deal for reasonable internet connectivity. As the mesh expands, users (in theory) pay less and less, especially as more backbone nodes are connected.

Paul_S 12y ago

Looking at trends like that is pointless. Interest in anything technical will decrease because more non-technical people become connected and the Internet reflects that. I bet there is more people (absolute numbers) interested today than in 2005. Do you think the percentage of technical people will increase over time? In the same way that almost no one was literate 1000 years ago which is now reversed.

gsteinb88 12y ago

Very long story short, the overhead in maintaining the link state information in meshed networks swamps the available bandwidth for even modest (think 20-40) numbers of nodes. Basically, as nodes are constantly moving/coming on- and off-line, nodes have to know which nodes are in the connection graph, so they exchange that information. But that eats up all of the bandwidth amazingly quickly, leaving no room for actual traffic. There are some other issues with meshed networks (latency, battery usage when you're just a client node, etc.), but especially for those of the kind described/dreamed about here (which are also known as MANETS -- mobile ad-hoc networks), the routing issue is a huge one. Finally, I should note the above isn't just academic; several companies have tried to build products based on these kinds of networks -- military contractors being one of note -- and have pretty much come up short. So until the really fundamental issues are worked out, which is in the realm of academic research, not implementation, we probably aren't going to see anything like this.

robinhoode 12y ago
Do you have any more information on this? I'm definitely curious what the problem looks like when stated in specific algorithmic terms (big-O and all that).
riboflavin 12y ago
This is really interesting. Thanks for this comment. So is something like Multipeer Connectivity Framework in existence mostly because it is a much weaker version of true mesh networking? (Or not mesh networking at all?) Do you think weaker versions of mesh networking that don't solve the underlying problems could also be valuable?
- yohanatan 12y ago
  You're accepting his defeatist attitude too quickly. The problems he lists are easily surmountable. The military uses mesh networking to a great degree of success. A globally-distributed up-to-date copy of the network topology is a faulty starting point.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wilecoyote 12y ago
Doesn't Sonos employ some type of mesh-based network? It appears to work reasonably well in practice, but not sure whether it is in fact a better alternative to current standard wifi alternatives. Anyone happen to know more about this?
ilaksh 12y ago
That's not some academics problem. Its an engineering problem. What those companies have proven is that given the particular approach they took and the constraints they had they could not make their mesh networks work. So the starting point for an engineer is what types of mesh networks work that don't need to globally broadcast topology updates in real time. It always amazes me how quick people are to accept someone else's incorrect approach to a problem or to dismiss a new paradigm because others havent had success. Meanwhile they spend enormous amounts of energy tweaking the parameters of an outdated paradigm to try to make it work a little longer. The main thing holding back new superior approaches to a problem solution is always the people who tried and failed and then kept saying it was unworkable thus preventing others from trying.

dvanduzer 12y ago

There are different tradeoffs when you're talking about a mesh based on physical topology versus the logical mesh of a DHT. I think we'll see some rapid advancements as Van Jacobson's NDN[0] and Miller's telehash[1] reach maturity. [0] http://named-data.net/ http://named-data.net/ [1] https://github.com/telehash/telehash.org/blob/master/background.md https://github.com/telehash/telehash.org/blob/master/backgro...

sciurus 12y ago

Good timing for a mesh networking post, since this year's WirelessBattleMesh starts tomorrow. "The Wireless Battle of the Mesh is an event that aims at bringing together people from across the world to test the performance of different routing protocols for ad-hoc networks, like Babel, B.A.T.M.A.N., BMX, OLSR, 802.11s and Static Routing." http://battlemesh.org/ http://battlemesh.org/

privong 12y ago

The article states, "Perhaps most importantly, the idea of mesh networking seems to be a fit with our current trend toward decentralization..." I think this isn't really an accurate statement. The examples given in the article (Uber, airbnb, bitcoin) could reasonably be called "decentralized" (though, one could argue that in a case like airbnb, the fact that you go through a company means it isn't actually decentralized), but on the whole, I'd say the trend, for the bulk of the population, is actually towards more centralization. Think Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. More people are storing their data in fewer places, so I think the trend is the opposite of what the author states. In that sense, it's not at all surprising that mesh networking is not popular.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Probably because right now at least, there's little incentive in keeping nodes up. OpenLibernet and Skycoin are trying to change that: http://www.openlibernet.org/ http://www.openlibernet.org/ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0

andreasvc 12y ago

I believe the answer is that it is basically a pipe dream. For some reason, these sorts of ideas infect people with breathless enthusiasm. Telcos won't be necessary anymore, the reliability will be so much better, etc. Of course the reality is different. There are technical reasons for this, such as mentioned in another comment, but what I also think is important is the human factor. People would have to be convinced to administer their mesh nodes, and of course there are network effects here (there's really only a point to this if there's a critical mass, at least around you). When you think of the average user what they really want is to pay some nominal fee to ensure that the maintenance of their uplink is Somebody Else's Problem--they don't want to reconfigure their mesh node just to check facebook &c.

rolleiflex 12y ago

Disclaimer: I'm creator of a mesh network, or a decentralised, anonymous 'reddit' called Aether.[0] [1] I'm probably biased. The main problem with these networks is not the declining user interest per se, it's rather that they are by their own nature, a) very hard to engineer, and b) almost impossible to monetise. The engineering effort required to make a decentralised network reach resilience (and visible uptime) of the most basic Rails web app on Heroku is orders of magnitude away from just hosting it. For A, Decentralisation is a cruel mistress; every assumption you will make about computers connecting to your network will slowly fall apart as you move deeper into the architecture, engineering and design of your services—that makes it a fascinating challenge as much as a hard one fortunately. On the more unfortunate side, you eventually end up with cases that require you to entirely reëngineer your stack to provide for them; and not providing them access is philosophically against the democratic access decentralisation offers. For starters, anything higher than C/C++ is probably a non–starter, a lesson I learned the hard way. My own work is built in Python and getting it to perform adequately well on even most medium–grade computers has been a challenge. Distributed network means distributed loads, and there is a significant amount of computers who aren't able to pull their own weight on the Internet, especially in the developing world. It also means that you'll be bogged down with a lot of platform support issues, small bugs etc. For B, there are two issues. The first issue is that in a decentralised network it's almost impossible to target a specific person or entity to pay if you're not willing to create an exception for yourself (i.e. all computers able to call your servers, and consequently in absence of your servers the network goes down) but if you're willing to do that, you can just make it into a traditional system in the first place, and you just made it both subject to your whims, and as fragile as any other centralised service. That's a no-go. Beyond this, the moral imperative is that you shouldn't be charging for a service that doesn't cost you money to maintain. For additional services, sure, but you still need to figure out how to attach an additional service without which the core network continues to function. In general, it's a massive engineering task that isn't lucrative, and the effort required to maintain and keep functional increases exponentially as the network scales. For me, I'm stuck at packaging the new version for the last few months because PyInstaller doesn't like the way I split Aether into two applications—and you end up with these corner cases nobody on the entire Internet has ever encountered before. There's no Stack Overflow for that. It's fun, but it's also tiring. [0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be-a-reddit-for-the-privacy-conscious http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be... [1] http://www.getaether.net http://www.getaether.net

ronaldx 12y ago

The cellular network example depends on somewhere having a reliable, direct connection to the parent network. So, the need for a reliable, direct connection trumps the need for mesh networking. If you solve the problem of having a reliable, direct connection somewhere, it's more effective to extend that solution rather than also covering the problem of mesh networking.

im3w1l 12y ago

Wouldn't the latency be just awful if you connected to someone through lots of wifi hops?