Proposal: Instead of probabilistic advert forwarding, forward first advert within a time frame unconditionally, remember it, and drop subsequend adverts within some time frame.

[dreirund]

Ahoj,

this is an alternative suggestion to "Proposal: Probabilistic Flood Forwarding for Advertisement Packets"/ "probabilistic flood advert repression":

Instead of probabilistic flood advert repression, I hereby suggest another method to limit flood adverts and at the same time makes room servers and contacts more reliably discoverable:

• Forward the first advert unconditionally -- maybe restricted to some (configurable) hop count (e.g. 5..7 by default to cater for regions but not countries).
• Save that there was an advert with a specific identity (or save only the first few byte of the identity if memory is an issue).
• When the same advert comes again with within a short to medium (configurable) time (maybe default 48 hours or even one week), ignore it or use the present probabilistic flood advert repression or use some other means based on hop count.
• Only after that time, transmit that advert again if it comes again.

Rationale:

• To save airtime, also nodes get configured to send flood adverts only rarely (e.g. one week).
• But if we think of MeshCore as some way to communicate even without internet, we rely on adverts to find contacts and room servers. And most of the time, we need to rely on adverts be transmitted via some hops, because when we are in the street of a town we even cannot hear the other node just 600m away also down in the street.
• Current probabilistic forwarding of adverts makes it in the default setting very unlikely to find other room servers in the same city, if all repeaters in town would have that setting.
• So I propose that first adverts are unconditionally forwarded, and to "cut down" on advert flooding those are remembered and ignored if they come too often.

Regards!