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I'm interested in building a network that is based on the LoRaWAN networking protocols. I've seen multiple references to LoRaWAN supporting a mesh configuration (instead of the standard star network topology), where there might be multiple hops between various nodes for a packet to reach a gateway.

Are these protocols (particularly the mesh aspect of it) published anywhere? I can't seem to find them.

For this particular project, I'd like to use these same protcols, but with custom radio hardware (on a different frequency band from LoRa).

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Many mesh implementations are based on Thread, which is one of the components of Matter, and is based on 6LoWPAN, which itself uses 802.15.4 wireless communications.

I believe Pycom’s mesh on LoRa used Thread as well, but I don’t think it’s open source. Not sure what other LoRa-based mesh implementations exist.

If you are interested solely in the repeating aspect, IIRC the LoRaWAN spec has a few details about that, but it’s mostly just a few fields in headers and the like.

There is a free, open source implementation of Thread, namely OpenThread, by Google. No idea if it’s usable over other technologies than 802.15.4.

Note that mesh is not magic: nodes acting as routers/repeaters will usually need external power sources (they can’t run on batteries, since they need to be listening all/most of the time). A few (non free) technologies say they can use battery-powered repeating nodes, but they’re the exception (and I don’t know how true this is in practice).

What kind of underlying protocol do you want to use, and what are your requirements/needs?

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  • Thanks for the info. All nodes actually have their own external power sources, and I'm actually using HF radio at a much lower frequency than LoRa. I was mostly interested in the routing algorithm that is used.
    – Jordan
    Commented Feb 25, 2023 at 0:13
  • Some sources say LoRaWAN mesh is based on RPL, though I don’t think it’s an official thing. But a “LoRaWAN RPL” search on Google yields a large number of results which seem interesting.
    – jcaron
    Commented Feb 25, 2023 at 9:12

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