Building Networks
This chapter will provide you with the knowledge needed to build networks with Reticulum, which can often be easier than using traditional stacks, since you don’t have to worry about coordinating addresses, subnets and routing for an entire network that you might not know how will evolve in the future. With Reticulum, you can simply add more segments to your network when it becomes necesarry, and Reticulum will handle the convergence of the entire network automatically.
Concepts & Overview
There are important points that need to be kept in mind when building networks with Reticulum:
In a Reticulum network, any node can autonomously generate as many adresses (called destinations in Reticulum terminology) as it needs, which become globally reachable to the rest of the network. There is no central point of control over the adress space.
Reticulum was designed to handle both very small, and very large networks. While the adress space can support billions of endpoints, Reticulum is also very useful when just a few devices needs to communicate.
Low-bandwidth networks, like LoRa and packet radio, can interoperate and interconnect with much larger and higher bandwidth networks without issue. Reticulum automatically manages the flow of information to and from various network segments, and when bandwidth is limited, local traffic is prioritised.
Reticulum provides sender/initiator anonymity by default. There is no way to filter traffic or discriminate it based on the source of the traffic.
All traffic is encrypted using ephemeral keys generated by an Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange on Curve25519. There is no way to inspect traffic contents, and no way to prioritise or throttle certain kinds of traffic. All transport and routing layers are thus completely agnostic to traffic type, and will pass all traffic equally.
Reticulum can function both with and without infrastructure. When transport nodes are available, they can route traffic over multiple hops for other nodes, and will function as a distributed cryptographic keystore. When there is no transport nodes available, all nodes that are within communication range can still communicate.
Every node can become a transport node, simply by enabling it in it’s configuration, but there is no need for every node on the network to be a transport node. Letting every node be a transport node will in most cases degrade the performance and reliability of the network.
In general terms, if a node is stationary, well-connected and kept running most of the time, it is a good candidate to be a transport node. For optimal performance, a network should contain the amount of transport nodes that provides connectivity to the intended area / topography, and not many more than that.
Reticulum is designed to work reliably in open, trustless environments. This means you can use it to create open-access networks, where participants can join and leave in an free and unorganised manner. This property allows an entirely new, and so far, mostly unexplored class of networked applications, where networks, and the information flow within them can form and dissolve organically.
You can just as easily create closed networks, since Reticulum allows you to add authentication to any interface. This means you can restrict access on any interface type, even when using legacy devices, such as modems. You can also mix authenticated and open interfaces on the same system. See the Common Interface Options section of the Interfaces chapter of this manual for information on how to set up interface authentication.
Reticulum allows you to mix very different kinds of networking mediums into a unified mesh, or to keep everything within one medium. You could build a “virtual network” running entirely over the Internet, where all nodes communicate over TCP and UDP “channels”. You could also build such a network using other already-established communications channels as the underlying carrier for Reticulum.
However, most real-world networks will probably involve either some form of wireless or direct hardline communications. To allow Reticulum to communicate over any type of medium, you must specify it in the configuration file, by default located at ~/.reticulum/config. See the Supported Interfaces chapter of this manual for interface configuration examples.
Any number of interfaces can be configured, and Reticulum will automatically decide which are suitable to use in any given situation, depending on where traffic needs to flow.
GO Back to the START:
THIS IS A PART OF THE
Back to the Node Startpage