Reticulum is a cryptography-based networking stack for wide-area networks built on readily available hardware, and can operate even with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth. Reticulum allows you to build very wide-area networks with off-the-shelf tools, and offers end-to-end encryption, autoconfiguring cryptographically backed multi-hop transport, efficient addressing, unforgeable packet acknowledgements and more.
Reticulum is a complete networking stack, and does not use IP or higher layers, although it is easy to utilise IP (with TCP or UDP) as the underlying carrier for Reticulum. It is therefore trivial to tunnel Reticulum over the Internet or private IP networks.