I’ve been interested in adhoc mesh networking for a while but I don’t really know where to get started software or hardware wise. I have lots of OpenWRT compatible equipment lying around and want to experiment.
I feel like internet blackouts are not a distant idea or all that improbable and I want to have some knowledge in my back pocket just in case.
Distributed mobile ad-hoc routing is an area of research where I feel there has never been a satisfactory answer to "how do I deliver data efficiently?" Typical schemes will cut your bandwidth to a quarter of its nominal rate.
Fixed ad-hoc routing is a little better, but tends to be kind of fragile since nodes can appear and disappear at random. I've never found a system that worked as well as I would like, although I think there could be value in a network that separates the high bandwidth user data from the low bandwidth routing data. Like it uses 802.11 for the data, and LoRa for the routing decisions.
That's an interesting idea, especially with routing over LoRa getting a lot of development. I've been following Meshtastic [0] where they're doing both routing and data payloads over LoRa in low powered communications devices.
It would be an interesting idea to have a device that could use 802.11 for data when in close enough range. With chips like the ESP8266 you could still have a relatively low power device but with much greater bandwidth.
I feel like internet blackouts are not a distant idea or all that improbable and I want to have some knowledge in my back pocket just in case.