swaitsandClaude Opus 4.7
4095fc91c7
Add a "Sender Behavior (Informational)" section to Section 17 that captures the cross-implementation conventions for how senders should behave above the wire format: - Path Learning: cache the reversed accumulated path from received flood-routed packets; replace only when the new path is at least as good (hash size, SNR threshold implementation-defined). - PATH_RETURN: proactive emission lets the original sender switch to direct routing without waiting for an explicit path probe. - Flood Fallback and Retries: track outstanding DMs by expected ack_crc, increment attempt on each retry, hold timestamp constant, fall back from direct to flood after N unacknowledged direct retries. - Transmission Priority (sender-originated) table: ACK > PATH > direct reply > flood reply > req/resp > group > advert. All of these are informational guidance; numeric tunings remain implementation-defined. Complements the existing forwarding-priority table. Validated against upstream meshcore-dev/MeshCore @ 1a7b361 (BaseChatMesh send/recv flow, Mesh::createPathReturn, handleReturnPathRetry). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
MeshCore Spec
A comprehensive specification and conformance test suite for the MeshCore mesh networking protocol.
MeshCore Spec aims to be the authoritative, machine-readable definition of the MeshCore wire format — much like RubySpec became the definitive specification of the Ruby language. Any implementation that passes the full test corpus can claim bit-perfect MeshCore compatibility.
What's Here
spec/— RFC-style protocol specification in Markdown, covering every layer from packet framing to cryptographic operations.corpus/— JSON test vectors organized by protocol layer. Each vector pairs a structured representation with its exact binary encoding, enabling any implementation to verify encode and decode correctness.tools/— Validation and generation utilities.
Test Vector Format
Test vectors are JSON files. Binary data is represented as uppercase hex strings (whitespace allowed for readability). Each file contains an array of vectors in one of three modes:
encode_decode— Structured input paired with expected binary output. Implementations MUST produce the given binary when encoding, and MUST recover the given structure when decoding.decode_only— Binary input with expected structured output. Used for alternate valid encodings that an encoder need not produce but a decoder MUST accept.invalid— Binary input that MUST be rejected by a conforming decoder.
See corpus/schema/test-vector.schema.json for the full schema.
Using the Corpus
- Parse each JSON file in
corpus/. - For
encode_decodevectors: encode thestructuredform and compare tobinary; decodebinaryand compare tostructured. - For
invalidvectors: attempt to decodebinaryand verify failure.
No special tooling is required — just a JSON parser and your MeshCore implementation.
Project Status
This project is under active development. The specification and corpus are being built from the official MeshCore firmware source code.
Protocol Versions
The corpus covers all known MeshCore protocol versions. Each test vector file
includes a protocol_version field. Version 1 (the current production version)
has the most comprehensive coverage.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Acknowledgments
Based on the MeshCore firmware by the MeshCore developers. Protocol documentation derived from the official MeshCore docs.