Yggdrasil is an experimental compact routing scheme that is fully decentralised

Summary

About Yggdrasil is an experimental compact routing scheme that is fully decentralised and only requires a small amount of state to work. It is predominanently a shortest-path scheme, whereby the network will attempt to find the most direct path to the destination. Nodes are equal participants and connect to each other using peering connections which carry network traffic. Peerings can be set up over any IP network — whether that’s a direct wired or wireless link, a local area network or even the Internet. In some cases, peerings can also be set up automatically by nearby devices on the same network using multicast discovery. All nodes on an Yggdrasil network are routers and will automatically pass traffic to help it get closer to its destination where possible. This means that, even in a network that is only sparsely connected, all nodes will be reachable by all other nodes on that network. It doesn’t even matter if a node is behind a NAT — once a peering is established, traffic flows in both directions over that peering. Yggdrasil is also designed to tolerate changes in the network. For example, if a link fails, the network will self-heal and use other links to route traffic where available. This makes it suitable for use in mesh networks, where the network topolopy can and often will change. Each node on the network has a location-independent cryptographic identity and, in our current experimental implementation, stable IPv6 addresses are generated from this key. This allows IPv6-supporting applications to work over Yggdrasil largely without modification. The address is fully mobile and stays with the node as it moves around the network. Why Yggdrasil? Many networks that exist today are hierarchical in nature, require extensive manual configuration and often rely on a certain degree of centralisation in order to scale. This often makes it difficult or impractical to set up networks quickly on an ad-hoc basis and so most people are heavily reliant on their Internet...