Wouldn't routing be much more efficient?

[Darin755]

I'm new to Meshtastic so bear with me.

From my understanding, routing uses less airtime since less redundant messages being sent. In the future, would Meshtastic ever consider implementing some sort of routing system? From what I can tell most nodes are either static or moving slowly enough to prevent the need for constant recalculations. Nodes that are moving rapidly or short lived could fall back to managed flooding.

Then again, I might simply be seeing this though the lense of IP networks. I know that many Meshtastic devices are ram and CPU limited but in theory this could be overcome by using something comparable to areas in OSPF.

For reference, here is the Babel routing protocol which is similar to what I'm thinking of. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8966.html I don't think Meshtastic has enough bandwidth for this to work but it would be cool if it did.

[tylerpieper]

There is a next hop routing feature that is in current firmware. Applies to everything but broadcast messages. Each node basically determines where it thinks the next hop should go to reach a specific node. Each node along the chain flags this in the next hop field, and if it doesn't hear that node echo the message it will fall back to flood. This isn't really well documented on the site but it's in place.