Presumably that is the key to getting out of the Apple ghetto.
Presumably that is the key to getting out of the Apple ghetto.
This is fine for managing a few hundred temperature sensors or lighting controls up to the building's floor concentrator, which is the main use case for this standard, but it is completely unsuitable for sending individual messages from user A to user B.
It would only take 4 people at 5 hops apart trying to exchange photos of less than a megabyte to completely saturate a network of hundred devices.
Ideally, the TTL should be as low as possible in order to preserve maximum bandwidth and not hit nodes far from the transmitter.
The Bitchat documentation indicates that the maximum TTL is 7. There is also mention of gateways on the internet to enable long-distance communication.
In the case of IoT devices, their location is generally fixed and the gateway or hub is placed in the centre in order to limit the TTL, save bandwith, limit wakeup time. Some more advanced mesh network protocols use flooding only for announcements and network mapping in order to avoid this problem. This allows it to define preferred routes, set up an acknowledgement system, replay, etc.