In current mesh or peer-to-peer networking protocols, there is a focus on securely and reliably transmitting data in sequence in two-way communications. Such protocols require substantial overhead because they establish communication sessions before any useful data is transferred, and they perform error checking, transmission acknowledgments, or the like, in order to accomplish those goals.
One example of this is a connection in the communication technology Bluetooth (registered trademark) Low Energy (BLE), for example. In BLE, it is possible to perform two-way communication between two nodes by establishing a connection. In order to establish a connection a master device must first discover a device advertising itself in a broadcast mode. The master sends a connection request to the broadcaster, and bidirectional communication is subsequently performed in accordance with parameters of the connection request. The connection must be managed, and may be lost under certain circumstances. In the communication, error checking using a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is performed, and packets are retransmitted when errors are discovered.
For use cases requiring only small amounts of data to be transmitted (for example, transmitting which one of a plurality of nodes in a network is currently “active”), overhead is quite high in terms of bandwidth, and complexity relative to the amount of data being transmitted when connections such as those used in BLE are used. That overhead leads to performance issues such as lags occurring when extensive checking is performed to ensure that every node in the network has the correct information, for example. Accordingly, such protocols may be unsuitable for network systems in which nodes must become aware of changes quickly.