Building Networks

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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 +

This chapter will provide you with the high-level knowledge needed to build networks with +Reticulum. It will not, however tell you all you need to know to succesfully +design and configure every kind of network you can imagine. For this, you will +most likely need to read this manual in its entirity, invest significant time +into experimenting with the stack, and learning functionality intuitively.

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Still, after reading this chapter, you should be well equipped to start that +journey. While Reticulum is fundamentally different compared to other +networking technologies, it can often be easier than using traditional stacks. +If you’ve built networks before, you will probably have to forget, or at least +temporarily ignore, a lot of things at this point. It will all makes sense in +the end though. Hopefully.

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If you’re used to protocols like IP, let’s at least start with some relief: +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 necessary, and Reticulum will handle the convergence of the entire network -automatically.

+automatically. There’s plenty more neat aspects like that to Reticulum, but +we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s cover the basics first.

Concepts & Overview

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Before you start building your own networks, it’s important to understand the +fundamental principles that distinguish Reticulum networks from traditional +networking approaches. These principles shape how you design your network, +what trade-offs you encounter, and what capabilities you can rely on.

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Reticulum is not a single network you “join”, it is a toolkit for creating networks. +You decide what mediums to use, how nodes connect, what trust boundaries exist, +and what the network’s purpose is. Reticulum provides the cryptographic foundation, +the transport mechanisms, and the convergence algorithms that make your design +workable. You provide the intent and the structure.

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This approach offers tremendous flexibility, but it requires thinking in terms of +different abstractions than those used in conventional networking.

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Introductory Considerations

There are important points that need to be kept in mind when building networks with Reticulum:

@@ -289,7 +313,12 @@ 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.
+network segments, and when bandwidth is limited, local traffic is prioritised. +You will, however, need to configure your interfaces correctly. If you tell +Reticulum to pass all announce traffic from a gigabit link to a LoRa interfaces, +it will try as best as possible to comply with this, while still respecting +bandwidth limits, but you will waste a lot of precious bandwidth and airtime, +and your LoRa network will not work very well.