Comparison to other projects

These comparisons are not official and are written by community members. If anything is incorrect or outdated, please let someone know or help fix them yourself.

Meshtastic

Meshtastic is a mesh network protocol working over LoRa and MQTT, optimized for smaller local networks. In general it can work reasonably well if there is no need to expand beyond LoRa or increase network size beyond that of a reasonably small community.

It’s fairly hard to compare Reticulum and Meshtastic because they work so differently and are based on entirely different philosophies, but they are often used in similar scenarios, so many attempt to do so regardless.

I have explained in my writeup that:

Unlike Reticulum, Meshtastic works almost exclusively over LoRa and relies on flood routing. Networks employing exclusively flood routing get exponentially less and less efficient for each node that is added, so in normal use it takes relatively few nodes sending data to completely overwhelm an entire network.

When sending 10 packets on a network of 5-10 nodes, the inefficiency of sending them all to everyone isn’t that bad, but sending 10,000 packets to everyone on a network of even just 50 nodes? Those inefficiencies will start to add up fast, which is why Reticulum does not use flood routing.

Meshtastic packets have a limited hop count of 7 hops (source) to limit that compounding inefficiency. Reticulum has a default limit of 128 hops because it isn’t limited by flood routing and can reliably scale beyond small local networks.

Some other differences include that:

Meshtastic's stack can run entirely on a microcontroller, while RNode currently requires a separate device like a Raspberry Pi Zero to handle routing. However this might not be the case soon, as a port of Reticulum to C++ is currently in development.

Meshtastic's encryption is optional (and only recently gained per-connection encryption) while Reticulum requires per-connection encryption and has forward secrecy, meaning that if a connection's key is compromised, no previous or future connections, even to the same destination, will be compromised. This means that, at least theoretically, the only feasible way to completely break Reticulum's encryption is to compromise the sender or recipient directly.