Meshcore link quality -> mapping and routing

[pierrbt]

Hi !

I have noticed traces are not very effective to check whether or not a route is usable. I've found a solution but it might be a bit complicated.

I've had the idea when I saw meshqual (note 1), a map that collects SNR values from repeaters and shows them on a map, showing strong and weak links, and I thought we could do that on a much larger scale.

Every repeaters would calculate a score (with avg SNR, jitter, min SNR, freshness, others?), for every neighbor repeater, for each packet they receive from them. This score would be added in the neighbors table.

Every day, this repeater would flood a packet with these information:

• full public ID
• timestamp
• n° of page
• for every neighbor : 4-byte address + score
• signature

Each companion would then collect these information in a buffer, and then the processing would be done in the Meshcore app :
keeping only a week old of data,
creating the oriented graph with (emitter, receiver, score)
displaying that on the map.

This would be useful for :

• Seeing strong links on the map
• Making a hybrid routing algorithm : using the scores first and fallback on flood
• Creating very long stable routes manually

I'd be happy to think about how we could improve the idea or adapting it. @liamcottle @ripplebiz @AI7NC @KPrivitt @oltaco
Pierre B.

Note 1 :
Meshqual is a map that shows SNR between repeaters. It doesn't work very well because it can only collects SNR from observers and not all repeaters. Here is an example : https://meshqual.gamma-network.eu/