Mesh Networking - options these days?

[50ShadesOfDirt]

On our property (no power or cell at most locations), I use a few Cuddeback game cams, and these have a proprietary mesh network built in (cuddelink) ... this is good stuff, as every cam forwards pics to the home cam (at my desk). Add a cam, it joins the mesh and does its thing ... mesh gets extended further out distance-wise, and over obstacles. Only issue of course is that this mesh is closed-source. I can't make use of it for anything else.

Looking for ideas/alternatives to building out my own mesh network, to access/move things (video, data, etc.) around on any size piece of rural land, with no requirements of cellular/wifi, except at an edge if desired.

This subject seems research-resistant at the moment ... rabbit-holes, proprietary dead-ends ...

Anybody pursuing such mesh networking, with IoT devices or any other platforms? Scheme, vendor names, as pointers to tech I can get at, and build such a network? As FOSS as possible?

Thanks!

[AndyBeez]

Sounds like a project using LoRa/LoRaWAN. It's autonomous, secure and long range. Don't anticipate wifi or 4G traffic speeds though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

https://lora-alliance.org

[Whales]

I don't think LoRa would be appropriate for video and image needs, unless it has might higher bitrate modes than the few kB/s I've dealt with?

You can do long-range wifi links.  Ubiquity sells complete units with dish reflectors just for this purpose and there are other competitors too (probably worth checking out).  They might be overkill, depending on the distances.

> any size piece of rural land

There are some pieces of rural land in Australia that warrant their own satellites 

I recommend staying away from mesh networking at the wireless layer if you can avoid it, it's not a reliable as point-to-point links and whilst some of it is standardised I've also seen lots of nonstandard stuff advertised as "mesh" (requiring you to buy all the same equipment from the same vendor).  If you want redundancy then I recommend you do redundant radios + links and then use some sort of routing mechanism (like spanning tree or whatever is better/easier these days) to auto-heal.