Yes, I am thinking of a mesh network. But, I do not know of any that scale well to a million nodes, or more like a billion nodes.
Anyone have ideas how to work a net with 100,000 visible nodes, and probably as little as 10 hopes to anywhere in the world?
You would need to have many more than 100k nodes. The way to build such a thing is to build a wired core using fiber and wireless edges.
If you use today's radio standards, then you would either need to encroach on the bandwidth set aside for LTE or have about a billion nodes using 2.4g wifi. Other solutions include satellites (but these tend to be high latency and not as reliable as needed) or terrestrial SDN.
And... Well what we are really discussing is building a new internet, so why not start with our traditional pal, tcp/ip?
It is a steadfast protocol...