Connection Gating

How OctoMY™ gives users explicit control over which types of communication traffic flow between nodes.

Overview

Connection gating provides three independent controls that gate three types of outgoing traffic. This allows users to selectively enable discovery (finding peers), data exchange (courier traffic), and physical transport (per-carrier toggles).

The Control Hierarchy

ConnectionStatusWidget
 [Honeymoon]        [Connect]
 (wantDiscovery)    (wantReachable)

 [Network]  [Bluetooth]  [Audio]  [Zoo]  [NFC]
 (per-channel toggles)

Honeymoon (wantDiscovery)

Controls discovery broadcasts — the mechanism for finding ALL peers on the network, both new and previously known.

• When ON: node broadcasts its presence and listens for others
• When OFF: no discovery traffic is sent
• Does NOT affect data exchange with already-connected peers

Connect (wantReachable)

Controls courier data exchange and session re-establishment with known, trusted peers.

• When ON: courier data flows, broken sessions are re-established automatically via handshake
• When ON and a trusted peer's address is unknown or stale: a short, bounded, self-quiescing reconnect burst reacquires the peer (a brief spike of discovery aimed at already-trusted peers, which then goes quiet) — so reconnecting no longer requires the pairing screen
• When OFF: no courier data sent, no handshakes initiated, incoming courier data silently dropped, no reconnect burst
• Handshake responses to incoming SYN packets are always allowed (passive acceptance)

The reconnect burst is deliberately not the Honeymoon control: it targets only peers already trusted, is short-lived and capped, and never enables full peer discovery. Honeymoon remains the explicit, louder "find everyone" control.

Channel Toggles (per-carrier)

Control which physical transport is active. When a channel is OFF, ALL traffic types on that carrier are blocked.

State Combinations

Key Semantics

• Independent controls: Connect ON does NOT automatically enable Honeymoon (and vice versa)
• Honeymoon finds ALL peers (new and known). Connect only re-establishes with KNOWN TRUSTED peers.
• Automatic re-handshake: When Connect is ON and a session breaks, the node re-handshakes automatically. This is connection maintenance, not discovery.
• Passive acceptance: Even with Connect OFF, the node responds to incoming handshake requests. This allows a peer with Connect ON to establish a session.

Implementation Architecture

Connection gating is implemented through the ReachableState class, which lives in libpair and is shared with Comms in libcomms.

libpair (ReachableState)  <-- no dependency on libcomms
libcomms (Comms, CommsChannel)  --> depends on libpair
    Comms::configure() wires commsConnectionStatusChanged -> ReachableState::setNetworkConnected()

Where Gating Is Enforced

Currently Supported Carriers