Networking | Protocol Labs Research

Networking

Computer networks enable information to move across the globe. They are foundational to the world we live in and to the vast majority of our work. Our interests include transport and routing protocols, network security, p2p systems, publish-subscribe protocols, and network monitoring and simulation.

Publications

Generalized Impact Evaluators

2023-01-10 / White paper
Existing funding systems fail to sufficiently fund public goods and common goods due to insufficient mechanisms for coordinating various agents towards valuable outcomes. Relative to traditional capital systems that scalably organize activity around maximizing financial performance, impact funding remains underdeveloped, especially in the ability to reward high-upside, high-uncertainty work.

Distributed systems, Networking

Enriching Kademlia by partitioning

2022-12-13 / Conference paper
Decentralizing the Web is becoming an increasingly interesting endeavor that aims at improving user security and privacy as well as providing guaranteed ownership of content. One such endeavor that pushes towards this reality is Protocol Labs’ Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) network, that provides a decentralized large scale file system to support the decentralized Web.

DINPS 22 / 2022.07.10 / Bologna, Italy
João Monteiro, Pedro Ákos Costa, João Leitão, Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras
ConsensusLab, ProbeLab

To the InterPlanetary File System – and beyond!: Peer-to-peer file sharing would make the Internet far more efficient

2022-11-07 / Journal article
When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020, the world made an unprecedented shift to remote work. As a precaution, some Internet providers scaled back service levels temporarily, although that probably wasn’t necessary for countries in Asia, Europe, and North America, which were generally able to cope with the surge in demand caused by people teleworking (and binge-watching Netflix).

IEEE Spectrum / 2022.11.07
Yiannis Psaras, Jorge M. Soares, David Dias
ResNetLab

Decentralized hole punching

2022-09-28 / Conference paper
We present a decentralized hole punching mechanism built into the peer-to-peer networking library libp2p. Hole punching is crucial for peer-to-peer networks, enabling each participant to directly communicate to any other participant, despite being separated by firewalls and NATs.

DINPS 2022 / 2022.07.10 / Bologna, Italy
Marten Seemann, Max Inden, Dimitris Vyzovitis
Distributed systems, Networking

Design and evaluation of IPFS: A storage layer for the decentralized web

2022-07-26 / Conference paper
Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures.

ACM SIGCOMM 2022 / 2022.08.26 / Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Dennis Trautwein, Aravindh Raman, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, Will Scott, Moritz Schubotz, Bela Gipp, Yiannis Psaras
ProbeLab

Pulsarcast: Scalable, reliable pub-sub over P2P nets

2021-06-21 / Conference paper
The publish-subscribe paradigm is a wildly popular form of communication in complex distributed systems. The properties offered by it make it an ideal solution for a multitude of applications, ranging from social media to content streaming and stock exchange platforms.

DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
Joao Antunes, David Dias, Luis Veiga
ResNetLab

The case for AI based Web3 reputation systems

2021-06-21 / Conference paper
Initiatives such as blockchains and decentralized storage networks are pushing for a decentralized Web3 to replace the current architecture. At the core of Web3 are network resource sharing services, which allow anyone to sell spare network capacity in return for rewards.

DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
Navin V. Keizer, Fan Yang, Yiannis Psaras, George Pavlou
ResNetLab

IPFS-FAN: A function-addressable computation network

2021-06-11 / Conference paper
Permissionless computation is one of the missing pieces in the web3 stack in order to have all the tools needed to “decentralise Internet services”. There are already proposals to embed computation in decentralised networks like smart contracts, or blockchain networks for computational offloading.

DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras, David Dias
ResNetLab

Accelerating content routing with Bitswap: A multi-path file transfer protocol in IPFS and Filecoin

2021-01-14 / Report
Bitswap is a Block Exchange protocol designed for P2P Content Addressable Networks. It leverages merkle-linked graphs in order to parallelize retrieval and verify content integrity. Bitswap is being used in the InterPlanetary File System architecture as the main content exchange protocol, as well as in the Filecoin network as part of the block synchronization protocol.

Alfonso de la Rocha, David Dias, Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab

PASTRAMI: Privacy-preserving, auditable, scalable & trustworthy auctions for multiple items

2020-12-07 / Conference paper
Decentralised cloud computing platforms enable individuals to offer and rent resources in a peer-to-peer fashion. They must assign resources from multiple sellers to multiple buyers and derive prices that match the interests and capacities of both parties.

Middleware '20 / 2020.12.07
Michał Król, Alberto Sonnino, Argyrios Tasiopoulos, Yiannis Psaras, Etienne Rivière
ResNetLab

Rewarding relays for decentralised NAT traversal using smart contracts

2020-10-11 / Conference paper
Traversing NATs remains a big issue in P2P networks, and many of the previously proposed solutions are incompatible with truly decentralised emerging applications. Such applications need a decentralised NAT traversal solution without trusted centralised servers.

Mobihoc '20 / 2020.10.11
Navin V. Keizer, Onur Ascigil, Yiannis Psaras, George Pavlou
ResNetLab

GossipSub: Attack-resilient message propagation in the Filecoin and ETH2.0 networks

2020-07-06 / Report
Permissionless blockchain environments necessitate the use of a fast and attack-resilient message propagation protocol for Block and Transaction messages to keep nodes synchronized and avoid forks. We present GossipSub, a gossip-based pubsub protocol, which, in contrast to past pubsub protocols, incorporates resilience against a wide spectrum of attacks.

Dimitris Vyzovitis, Yusef Napora, Dirk McCormick, David Dias, Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab

Automating QUIC interoperability testing

2020-06-12 / Conference paper
We present QuicInteropRunner, a test framework for automated and on-demand interoperability testing between implementations of the QUIC protocol. We describe the key constraints and insights that defined our work, the recent innovations that made the framework possible, a high-level overview of our design, and a few exemplary tests.

ACM SIGCOMM 2020 Workshop on Evolution, Performance, and Interoperability of QUIC / 2020.08.14
Marten Seemann, Jana Iyengar
Networking

Merkle-CRDTs: Merkle-DAGs meet CRDTs

2020-04-27 / Conference paper
We study Merkle-DAGs as a transport and persistence layer for Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs), coining the term Merkle-CRDTs and providing an overview of the different concepts, properties, advantages and limitations involved.

Hector Sanjuan, Samuli Poyhtari, Pedro Teixeira, Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab

Gossipsub-v1.1 evaluation report

2020-04-18 / Report
Permissionless blockchain environments necessitate the use of a fast and attack-resilient message propagation protocol for Block and Transaction messages to keep nodes synchronized and avoid forks. We present GossipSub, a gossip-based pubsub protocol, which, in contrast to past pubsub protocols, incorporates resilience against a wide spectrum of attacks.

Talks

Blog

Generalized Impact Evaluators, A year of experiments and theory

2023-01-12
TLDR: Protocol Labs’ Network Funding team is releasing a whitepaper on Impact Evaluators, a funding mechanism designed for nontraditional projects with high uncertainty and high upside. Our goal is to add structure to the ongoing dialogue and share practical implementation advice based on a year of experience.

Network Goods

Announcing the final award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"

2023-01-10
PL Research is pleased to announce the final research proposal funded as part of the Changing the Internet Initiative: a project by Maria Apostolaki and Jennifer Rexford of Princeton University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments, respectively, to improve the state of the art in routing and edge networking.
Karola Kirsanow

Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2022

2022-08-26
Protocol Labs Research is thrilled to announce the first research funding recipients of 2022! We fund researchers around the world and have given out 11 awards so far this year. These awards include three RFPs, two Summer Research Grants, five Doctoral fellowships, and one Postdoctoral fellowship.

Abby Silin

Announcing RFP-014: The one with private retrieval

2022-08-08
Can we speak privately? Unfortunately, our current options for private communication are limited, hamstrung by their reliance on a single-trusted-origin data publication model, high latencies, and security vulnerabilities. We think it is possible to design a scalable system that doesn’t sacrifice latency for privacy.

Karola Kirsanow, Will Scott

Introducing ProbeLab

2022-07-26
This post was originally published in the IPFS blog and is reprinted here with minor edits. ProbeLab is an effort to apply solid scientific measurement methodologies to benchmark and optimize network protocols that operate in decentralized P2P environments.

Yiannis Psaras

Announcing the first award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"

2022-07-25
PL Research is pleased to announce the first research project funded as part of the Changing the Internet Initiative: a project by Scott Shenker of ICSI and UC Berkeley, Arvind Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington, James McCauley of Mount Holyoke College, and Aurojit Panda of NYU to improve access to Web3 services by creating a better client interface and user experience for accessing Web3 content.

Karola Kirsanow

Decentralized internet, networks, protocols, and systems (DINPS) workshop at IEEE ICDCS 2022: call for contributions

2022-01-12
Call for Papers Announcement: Workshop on Decentralized Internet, Networks, Protocols, and Systems Website: https://research.protocol.ai/sites/dinps/ Submission Deadline: 5 March 2022 In June 2021, we ran a workshop on “Decentralizing the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin” (DI2F) alongside IFIP Networking 2021 to establish a forum for academics, researchers, and developers to share their expertise and latest findings on decentralized storage, IPFS, libp2p, and Filecoin.

João Leitão, Yiannis Psaras

Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 2

2021-12-21
Last week we introduced you to the researchers pursuing key problems in cryptography via RFP-009, RFP-010, and a Nucleation Grant. Now we are excited to share the recipients of research awards intended to fund proposals from PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty through our open grant offerings.

Jonathan Gross

A visualization tool for the IPFS DHT

2021-12-13
At the Mobile Multimedia Lab of the Athens University of Economics and Business, we have been working on optimizations for the InterPlanetary File System distributed hash table (IPFS DHT) and, in particular, on Multi-Level DHT support.

Spyros Voulgaris, Yiannis Psaras

Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin (DI2F) — a report from the trenches

2021-07-21
The first edition of the DI2F Workshop, which took place on 21 June 2021 and focused on decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin, has been a phenomenal success! We received more than 20 submissions, out of which 11 were selected to be presented on the day (scroll down to the three sections at the bottom of this page for the full text).

Yiannis Psaras, Jorge M. Soares

ResNetLab on Tour in Australia

2021-06-08
On May 5th, ResNetLab participated in a flagship event involving four major Australian universities — Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), University of New South Wales, Australian National University and Macquarie University — and lots of Web 3.

Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras