[Off Topic] WiFi HaLow, Mesh, and Low Powered Devices

[Andrew Singleton]

Would be interested in that video ya.

Similarly I need to do a proper writeup of the thing I want so i can post to places like this so people can tell me of that exists or not.

Dec 2, 2021 2:24:32 PM John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>:

> On Thu, Dec 02 2021, Andrew Singleton wrote:
> 
>> Look. I live Simi-Rural. Meaning not so far out that you have hundreds
>> of acres for cattle, or farms or whatever. Just an eight acre piece of
>> land that's more of a family hobby project than anything. And yet that
>> is still a fairly sizeable chunk of land so far as traditional wifi is
>> concerned.
> 
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> I've been interested in these protocols for a long time.  I've written
> some stuff that runs atop LoRA and XBee SX, for instance, including PPP
> or tun/tap IP/ethernet stacks.
> 
> HaLow looks like an interesting middle ground; not as long of a range
> (1km vs 10km) but more easily integrated.
> 
> I hear you on the LoRA bandwidth.  XBee SX is better, and I've seen
> effective rates of 50Kbps out of the thing.  My xbnet program at
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet covers running TCP/IP using tun/tap as
> well as PPP over it at
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet/blob/master/doc/xbnet.1.md and I also
> cover running UUCP over the thing.  The XBee SX also has a
> point-to-point "modem emulation" mode in which it looks behaves like a
> regular modem to the OS (no translation code necessary).  That removes
> some of the possibilities of direct node-to-node communication, of
> course, but could, eg, host a number of PPP connections for
> connectivity.
> 
> The XBee devices are also interesting for a couple of other reasons.
> One, is they support a self-assembling mesh in firmware, so you get mesh
> routing without having to do anything on the software side.  Very handy,
> though of course it reduces available bandwidth.  Secondly, they support
> TX power up to 1W which is what allows them to achieve near-LoRA
> distance while having a much faster bitrate.  However, they are more
> expensive than LoRA devices, and obviously in the case of the 1W ones,
> more power-hungry.
> 
> Since we're talking about old protocols, there is, of course, UUCP.
> There is a more modern replacement called NNCP that has quite a few nice
> properties.  It is still asynchronous, but it is fully encrypted and
> authenticated, supports tor-style onion routing and async multicast, and
> so forth.  I have made some blog posts about it and also offer Usenet
> feeds over NNCP.  UUCP or NNCP would be perfect fits for something like
> this.
> 
> Another interesting program is Syncthing.  Think of it like a serverless
> Dropbox.  It is fully distributed, and every peer in a network can
> propagate changes.
> 
> Both Syncthing and NNCP support a "traveler" device -- say a phone that
> goes to civilization periodically and syncs up things that propagate
> to/from a remote location.
> 
> And, there is NNTP, the protocol behind Usenet.  Usenet can be
> exchanged via NNTP, but also via asynchronous means (NNCP, UUCP, etc).
> It can be done in a very low-bandwidth way and could propagate posts,
> (small) files, etc.
> 
> Finally, don't forget email.  It can be routed in all sorts of ways, too.
> 
> I have been writing and coding around some of this stuff.  See:
> 
> https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/gitsync-nncp/blob/main/gitsync-nncp.org
> 
> I also have a 5-minute lightning talk video I should get uploaded one of
> these days...
> 
> - John