Discovery & topology

Advertisements suggest routes; they do not authorize them

Signed Wi-Fi Aware advertisements contain the ride tag, peer public key, root index, ancestry, root pulse, serial, capacity, and cumulative cost. Signatures and ride tags identify relevant information, while freshness and ancestry checks reject stale or known-cyclic choices.

Discovery handles are opaque platform references. They can change without changing a rider’s cryptographic identity. A desired parent is only a candidate until transport, identity, and protocol activation have completed.

One active parent, several possible roles

A rider has at most one active parent and one standby parent. Active child links form branches. Standby candidates carry coordination and probes, not ordinary voice. After a handoff, the old edge drains before scoped teardown. The advertised path changes only after the matching activation acknowledgment.

A fresh link and a fresh root are different facts

Discovery information expires after 6 seconds; unchanged root pulse information expires after 4.5 seconds. A healthy direct parent can refresh its route during a discovery gap. Relayed heartbeats cannot masquerade as proof of a direct neighbor’s health.

Partitions have local recovery

A partition can temporarily form another root and later merge when eligible routes become available. Known ancestry checks and transactional changes reduce cycles, but they are not a proof of instantaneous global acyclicity under arbitrary message delays. Network capacity can force a break-before-make transition.