To be as widely usable and efficient to deploy as possible, the following goals have been used to guide the design of Reticulum:

• Fully useable as open source software stackReticulum must be implemented with, and be able to run using only open source software. This is critical to ensuring the availability, security and transparency of the system.

• Hardware layer agnosticismReticulum must be fully hardware agnostic, and shall be useable over a wide range of physical networking layers, such as data radios, serial lines, modems, handheld transceivers, wired Ethernet, WiFi, or anything else that can carry a digital data stream. Hardware made for dedicated Reticulum use shall be as cheap as possible and use off-the-shelf components, so it can be easily modified and replicated by anyone interested in doing so.

• Very low bandwidth requirementsReticulum should be able to function reliably over links with a transmission capacity as low as 5 bits per second.

• Encryption by defaultReticulum must use strong encryption by default for all communication.

• Initiator AnonymityIt must be possible to communicate over a Reticulum network without revealing any identifying information about oneself.

• Unlicensed useReticulum shall be functional over physical communication mediums that do not require any form of license to use. Reticulum must be designed in a way, so it is usable over ISM radio frequency bands, and can provide functional long distance links in such conditions, for example by connecting a modem to a PMR or CB radio, or by using LoRa or WiFi modules.

• Supplied softwareIn addition to the core networking stack and API, that allows a developer to build applications with Reticulum, a basic set of Reticulum-based communication tools must be implemented and released along with Reticulum itself. These shall serve both as a functional, basic communication suite, and as an example and learning resource to others wishing to build applications with Reticulum.

• Ease of useThe reference implementation of Reticulum is written in Python, to make it easy to use and understand. A programmer with only basic experience should be able to use Reticulum to write networked applications.

• Low costIt shall be as cheap as possible to deploy a communication system based on Reticulum. This should be achieved by using cheap off-the-shelf hardware that potential users might already own. The cost of setting up a functioning node should be less than $100 even if all parts needs to be purchased.

Reticulum is a networking stack suited for high-latency, low-bandwidth links. Reticulum is at its core a message oriented system. It is suited for both local point-to-point or point-to-multipoint scenarios where all nodes are within range of each other, as well as scenarios where packets need to be transported over multiple hops in a complex network to reach the recipient.

Reticulum does away with the idea of addresses and ports known from IP, TCP and UDP. Instead Reticulum uses the singular concept of destinations. Any application using Reticulum as its networking stack will need to create one or more destinations to receive data, and know the destinations it needs to send data to.

All destinations in Reticulum are represented as a 16 byte hash. This hash is derived from truncating a full SHA-256 hash of identifying characteristics of the destination. To users, the destination addresses will be displayed as 16 hexadecimal bytes, like this example: <13425ec15b621c1d928589718000d814>.