I've long imagined that a content centric mesh network approach would be a better starting point than what we've built up currently, but it seems like such a deep and mysterious subject and I have no idea where to even begin to get started.
I had other friends back in the early 2000s working on WiMax, and the hardest part of their work was getting QoS right. More recently (still 10+ years ago), another friend implemented a TCP proxy for a major cell phone provider in the US that used a more wireless friendly congestion control protocol on the wireless network side of things as regular TCP breaks down when latency increases due to reception issues (which gets interpreted as congestion and triggers retransmits). Since the cellular base stations ensured that the wireless network was effectively lossless (albeit with periods of much higher latency), performance for end users increased substantially when the bulk of the TCP retransmits were suppressed.
There's a huge gap between making wireless work vs making it work well. For me, 5G is a step backwards as all the tricks used to push for higher data rates (like larger QAM constellations) make everything worse in rural areas with poor reception: there just isn't a good enough SNR 99% of the time for the new shiny, and the increased power usage does nothing other than drain my phone's battery faster than it did with older LTE. But that is where all the money for research is today.
Wireless is complicated.
If you're talking about fast and low latency connection then look into existing meshes, almost every popular mesh has some sort of paper describing how it works.
This device however - an entire Raspberry Pi + hat for a router to do..? ... seems like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
I understand some hams run a meshtastic repeater primarily to convince meshtastic users to become hams.
But yes, it can't realistically be compared to something like a "real" MANET system with $10k radios that can do something like 100mbps data rates. It is dramatically more accessible and deployable though.
HaLow has lots more bandwidth, 433Mbps max, which allows for proper networking. It can bridge to other networks. But the practical range is only 1km. Also, the radios are expensive while LoRa is cheap.
But yes, 11s Mesh also works. Let us know on the forum (https://community.morsemicro.com/) or via github (https://github.com/MorseMicro/) if you're having issues. Err, I work for Morse in case that wasn't clear.
Airsoft?! Huh?
ATAK is not necessarily the most intuitive UI, but it's crazy powerful for doing basically anything outdoors.
However MeshCore makes one fundamental choice which is severely limiting. It uses a single LoRa discriminator and channel for all nodes. That said, LoRa limitations pretty much force this choice.
This, limits a typical network (3 repeaters) to about 500 messages/hour. The throughput scales inversely by how many repeaters you can hear.
The code does try to adjust down the TX power of a repeater in repeater-dense networks, which probably helps keep throughput consistent for a while.
For these things to work at scale they either need something other than LoRa (which is quite novel, but limited) or they need to figure out how to use LoRa in a way which allows for more channelization.
Until then, the “one transmission at a time on the air” in these very low baud networks is severely limiting.
Semtech announced recently that their new chips will be able to decode all spread factors on a specific bandwidth and center.
That being said, that would allow new LoRa nodes being capable of listening on effectively 8 different channels (that dont conflict) and transmitting on 1.