Why Meshtastic Uses Managed Flood Routing
Designing a low-bandwidth wireless mesh network to run on low-power microprocessors with limited memory is challenging. Arguably the simplest mesh routing protocol is Flood Routing: each radio receiving a packet will rebroadcast this again, up to a defined hop limit. Although Meshtastic is based on this strategy, there are a few subtle, but significant enhancements. Most importantly, before a node rebroadcasts, it waits a short while and listens if anyone else is already rebroadcasting. If so, it will not rebroadcast again. Therefore, “Managed Flood Routing” would be a better name. For more details on the enhancements, please review our documentation.