2 ms·

The idea of a meshnet is that, as the name implies, it's a mesh. It usually involves intelligent rerouting over other peers if a previous route is no longer ava

The idea of a meshnet is that, as the name implies, it's a mesh. It usually involves intelligent rerouting over other peers if a previous route is no longer available. If you were to put up a big WiMax antenna, you are the single point of failure - you could spy on the traffic, you could banish specific clients, and if you were to disappear, everybody in your neighbourhood would be without internet. A mesh network allows none of these (in theory), because there is not one single point of control.

superuser2 12y ago
Mesh is a topology, not a belief system. A mesh network can still be administered by one entity who can monitor traffic, manage configuration, and restrict access to authorized users, but they would do so using a distributed system rather than the control panel of a single piece of equipment. It's different from what you describe in that a typical WiMax antenna setup mirrors the star topology typical with network switches. Clients are connected to a piece of infrastructure, which is in turn connected to a larger piece of infrastructure, and so on up the tree. In a mesh network, clients are connected to each other without using infrastructure as an intermediary. Every node relays traffic for its neighbors, and you reach distant points by hopping through many of your neighbors (or you don't, if they don't happen to currently be arranged in a way that facilitates that). A good mesh network system has intelligent routing algorithms that are some combination of fault-tolerant, efficient at finding the shortest path, equitable in distributing load, and designed well in terms of incentive structure (so that people do not freeload by acting as clients but not relays). If you are using a mesh network to reach the internet, you are still dependent on the nodes that route between the mesh network and an actual ISP, which presumably pay for the privilege and want to recoup costs somehow. However, it can be a decent way for a community to roll its own last-mile infrastructure, provided it can purchase wholesale transit somewhere within the mesh, and drive enough participation that there is sufficient capacity between you and the backhaul most of the time. The more interesting uses are for meshes that are not (mostly) about Internet access. There is experimental work on protocols for messaging and durable document storage/publication (think Wikipedia but without web servers) that work well on meshes, providing pretty good internet-like capabilities to areas where access to the actual Internet is impractical. (Some of this is embedded in OLPC/XO).

superuser2 12y ago

Mesh is a topology, not a belief system. A mesh network can still be administered by one entity who can monitor traffic, manage configuration, and restrict access to authorized users, but they would do so using a distributed system rather than the control panel of a single piece of equipment. It's different from what you describe in that a typical WiMax antenna setup mirrors the star topology typical with network switches. Clients are connected to a piece of infrastructure, which is in turn connected to a larger piece of infrastructure, and so on up the tree. In a mesh network, clients are connected to each other without using infrastructure as an intermediary. Every node relays traffic for its neighbors, and you reach distant points by hopping through many of your neighbors (or you don't, if they don't happen to currently be arranged in a way that facilitates that). A good mesh network system has intelligent routing algorithms that are some combination of fault-tolerant, efficient at finding the shortest path, equitable in distributing load, and designed well in terms of incentive structure (so that people do not freeload by acting as clients but not relays). If you are using a mesh network to reach the internet, you are still dependent on the nodes that route between the mesh network and an actual ISP, which presumably pay for the privilege and want to recoup costs somehow. However, it can be a decent way for a community to roll its own last-mile infrastructure, provided it can purchase wholesale transit somewhere within the mesh, and drive enough participation that there is sufficient capacity between you and the backhaul most of the time. The more interesting uses are for meshes that are not (mostly) about Internet access. There is experimental work on protocols for messaging and durable document storage/publication (think Wikipedia but without web servers) that work well on meshes, providing pretty good internet-like capabilities to areas where access to the actual Internet is impractical. (Some of this is embedded in OLPC/XO).