This is being tested now in our 5.0 release which we’ve mentioned various times here on these boards — stay tuned for a posting soon that will invite you to sign up to beta test the next goTenna Mesh release which includes more hops and an entirely revamped app UI!
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Thank you for an educated reaponse, finally… For all of you that dont understand such “complicated” talk… he just confirmed exactly what ive been saying…
until they allow unlimited hops… you can very easily exhaust them if you have a high concentration of transmitters in one small area. every time your msg is transmitted to a new “transceiver”, it increases 1. After 3 hops (4 transceivers total), youre DONE. period.
I’ll wait for the unlimited hops.
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No. The message still travels A-F-G as per your original post if A can reach F and F can reach G. Whether the other paths are exhausted or not does not matter.
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@ertony not sure if I get you, but just to be clear, even with the current protocol a source can send to a destination that is within 3 hops irrespective of how many nodes are around the source (or destination). This is because at least one copy of the message will be transmitted along the 3-hop-or-less path.
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ertony
Could you explain how the current configuration is bad? What kind of range are you looking to get? Your first broadcast will reach “x” distance (this depends on a lot of environmental factors). Lets say your single point range (radius) is .5 miles, your still getting out .5 miles. From there another node (and all those in between) will pick up your signal. The outer edge of this .5 miles is what you care about. That’s one hop to get .5 miles out. The nodes at the outer edge then re-transmits. Depending on where they are located at you might get any where from 100 feet to 8 miles if that node is located high up (maybe more). Once again this depends on environmental factors and LOS. I have one relay node located in Philadelphia on the 10th floor of a building. Then the scenario repeats. Lets say Node 2 had a 1 mile radius. Once again you really only care about this 1 mile outer ring. That’s hop 2, depending on node 3’s radius / reach you will get another x miles.
I’m not sure unlimited hops would be good for network traffic? Anyway I could be wrong with some of this but that’s what I got from this thread so far.
@RamR, thank you for the detailed explanation of how Aspen Grove works.
@ertony, I suggest you re-read RamR’s post. There are protections in place to prevent loops. If a message does happen to follow a path that will exhaust the hop count, then that path will simply stop when no hops are left. These devices don’t follow a single chain, one broadcast is heard and relayed through ALL devices that are in range if the initial broadcast doesn’t reach the IR. If any path within the hop count exists between sender and receiver, that message will go through. If it doesn’t, the app says “Delivery Unconfirmed”, and you can manually re-send the message if you’d like.
If it would help, I can set up a demonstration and show how the devices actually function in your scenario.
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It’s a little complicated, but not unnecessarily so. The “unlimited hop” paradox you fear as a limitation, though…
This is a relatively unlikely event for most. It would occur only if those hops failed to reach a unit/addressee beyond the the reach of any single unit’s effective transmitting radius that would otherwise be reachable via the available number of intermediate hops. If the addressee were within range of direct LOS reception of the sender or those of the available intermediate hops, it would receive the message that way.
Any incremental increase in the hop count would tend to alleviate the bulk of this already relatively small number of users who might experience these intermittent failures in fringe reception coverage. As users acclimate to the broader coverage footprint, the problem would again increase along the margins, while the vast bulk of users in the primary coverage area would experience no problems.
Given the planned for increases in hop handling capability, this problem with a tendency to recur seems very manageable and of little consequence. It might be better to see encountering such issues as at least as much an indication of goTenna Mesh’s successful adoption by users as they are a problem.
That’s what cell companies do and I doubt there’s more than a handful of people holding off buying one of those until they achieve 100% coverage with their networks. There are drivers who insist that the car they drive be capable of Indy Car-level performance, even though there is no legal speed limit in the nation that would allow its operation above double-digit speeds. In the Land Cruiser community, there are people who insist they aren’t trail ready until their truck has every option Toyota ever offered, plus a few more, this in a vehicle capable in bone stock form of exceeding the off-road performance of 99.9% of all other vehicles on the highway. If your expectations are unlimited, it can be hard finding satisfaction in what just seems to work for most others.
To return this to radio, a radio of any type has an effective range under given conditions, even though we theoretically understand those radio waves just keep going to the reaches of the universe. AFAIK, there are no radios that actually have an unlimited range in practice. Most fall far short of anything like “unlimited” range. The range of goTenna mesh is a function of the individual unit’s range multiplied by the number of hops that forwarding allows. No, it’s not unlimited, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s unclear to me (maybe too complicated? 
) what this has to do with efficiency and I don’t see the logic in insisting the goTenna achieve something no other radio is capable of before it might be taken seriously itself.
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In an attempt to prove a) that I procrastinate when I should do other work and b) that there is not an exhausting of hops issue I humbly submit this fine artistic rendering.
In the above each green dot is a GoTenna node. Node 0 sends out MSG1 and after much travel, through a mesh network, MSG 1 is delivered to Node 12 (the destination) via 1 of two paths.
Note TTL is the Time to Live as referenced above. Nodes receiving a message with a TTL of 0 will not re-transmit at present.
In this example, there are 14 receiving nodes. However, only two of the original 3 MSG 1 TTL 3 messages were passed on successfully.
Of the messages that arrived at Node 12 one was TTL 0 and one still could have been repeated one more time.
The message was sent out and received by another node 15 times.
Hope this clarifies and shows just how robust a system must be to transmit around tall buildings, factories, houses, trees, pagodas, giant snow globes and a herd of elephants (I heard of).
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@firqby This is amazing — sorry for my belated acknowledgment of your killer diagram.
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Great diagram.
Beautifully depicted and very clear about how hops are decremented.
And I have heard of elephants, but the collective noun is herd.
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Grammatical correction made with a nod to rule above.
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