WAVE Mesh
WAVE Mesh is a WAVE-native overlay network for resilient media transport — a thin, coordinator-driven control plane that routes streams across regions and fails over before a stream drops. It sits alongside WAVE Bridge as the conversion/overlay layer: Bridge gets the signal into WAVE; Mesh keeps it moving over the network WAVE owns end to end.
Per its design decision (ADR-002, WAVE-native overlay), Mesh replaces "borrow a third-party tailnet" with a control plane WAVE runs itself — one identity (WAVE tokens), one bill, one trust root. Nodes dial out on :443 and never need inbound reachability.
What it does
- Coordinator-driven routing. A small control-plane service decides the path each leg takes and steers traffic — you configure nothing per network.
- Multi-region reach. Routing spans regions, so a stream can take the healthy path rather than the only one.
- Heartbeat-driven failover. Liveness is tracked continuously; when an uplink degrades, the mesh re-routes — the "stream didn't drop" moment.
What's live today
The control plane is live, behind the gateway:
- Coordinator + gateway route. Mesh is reachable at
api.wave.online/v1/mesh/*, fronted by the WAVE gateway. - Scope-enforced and audited. Access is gated by the gateway's
meshscope — the gateway is the single enforcement plane (auth, scope, metering) — and privileged operations are audit-logged. - Multi-region routing + heartbeat failover. Multi-uplink route planning and heartbeat-driven failover are implemented in the coordinator.
What's planned, not built: a zero-config node agent and a flat WAVE-Mesh address for any node to reach any other regardless of NAT (ADR-002 phases M2–M4) are roadmap. This page describes only what is live; nothing here is a benchmark or a customer claim.
Pricing
WAVE Mesh is value-based and metered monthly. Because the coordinator's cost to operate is effectively zero, pricing reflects the reliability it delivers, not raw infrastructure cost — roughly a 99% gross margin by design.
| Dimension | Price | What it meters |
|---|---|---|
| Requests routed | $0.0002 / routed control op | Core usage unit. At typical heartbeat volume that's about $6 per device per month — the overlay-network market norm. |
| Failover | $0.02 / failover event | The reliability premium — the moment the stream didn't drop. |
| Active regions | $2.00 / active region / month | Footprint and reach. |
| Routing policies | $1.00 / active policy / month | The control surface. |
How it bills
Metered monthly, and inert until a subscription attaches — you pay only for what routes. Until a mesh subscription is active, every dimension bills $0. This mirrors the metering model WAVE already runs for Bridge.
See WAVE Bridge for the conversion layer Mesh sits beside, and the API reference for the full contract.