Why MeshCore Scales Better Than Flooding

Understanding the difference between ~~MeshCore’~~MeshCore's path-discovery routing and ~~Meshtastic’~~Meshtastic's flood routing explains why the two protocols behave very differently in large networks.

Flood Routing (Meshtastic)

Every relay node retransmits every message it receives.
Air time consumed grows with every additional relay node.
Channel utilization increases as the network grows —- more nodes means more congestion.
Works well in small networks; degrades in large or dense deployments.

Path-Discovery Routing (MeshCore)

Only nodes on the established path retransmit unicast messages.
Air time per message is bounded once a path is known.
The more two nodes communicate, the fewer retransmissions are needed —- the network gets quieter over time.
Scales to large networks without proportional growth in radio traffic.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Attribute	MeshCore (path-discovery)	Meshtastic (flooding)
First message to unknown node	Floods (once)	Floods (always)
Subsequent messages to known node	Path-only retransmissions	Floods (always)
Congestion as network grows	Low —- reduces with use	High —- grows with nodes
Average power per message at scale	Lower	Higher
Group / broadcast messages	Flood	Flood
Route failure recovery	Re-floods after 3 retries	N/A —- always floods

Practical Implications

Power consumption —- Infrastructure repeaters on MeshCore consume less power per forwarded message at scale because they are silent when not on an active path.
Frequency reuse —- Less channel congestion means the same frequency can support more simultaneous conversations.
Predictable latency —- Once a path is established, message delivery latency is consistent; it does not depend on how many nodes happen to be awake.
Dense deployments —- In city-wide or event-scale deployments, ~~MeshCore’~~MeshCore's approach avoids the broadcast storm problem that can make large Meshtastic networks unreliable.