RFC - libp2p

Authors:

• Juan Benet
• David Dias

Reviewers:

tl;dr; This document presents libp2p, a modularized and extensible network stack to overcome the networking challenges faced when doing peer-to-peer applications. libp2p is used by IPFS as its networking library.

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Abstract

This describes the IPFS network protocol. The network layer provides point-to-point transports (reliable and unreliable) between any two IPFS nodes in the network.

This document defines the spec implemented in libp2p.

Status of this spec

This spec is a Work In Progress (WIP).

Organization of this document

This RFC is organized by chapters described on the Table of contents section. Each of the chapters can be found in its own file.

Table of contents

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 Motivation
  • 1.2 Goals
• 2 An analysis the state of the art in network stacks
  • 2.1 The client-server model
  • 2.2 Categorizing the network stack protocols by solutions
  • 2.3 Current shortcommings
• 3 Requirements
  • 3.1 NAT traversal
  • 3.2 Relay
  • 3.3 Encryption
  • 3.4 Transport agnostic
  • 3.5 Multi-multiplexing
  • 3.6 Enable several network topologies
  • 3.7 Resource discovery
• 4 Architecture
  • 4.1 Peer Routing
  • 4.2 Swarm
  • 4.3 Distributed Record Store
  • 4.4 Discovery
• 5 Data structures
• 6 Interfaces
  • 6.1 libp2p
  • 6.2 Peer Routing
  • 6.3 Swarm
  • 6.4 Distributed Record Store
• 7 Properties
  • 7.1 Communication Model - Streams
  • 7.2 Ports - Constrained Entrypoints
  • 7.3 Transport Protocol
  • 7.4 Non-IP Networks
  • 7.5 On the wire
    • 7.5.1 Protocol-Multiplexing
    • 7.5.2 multistream - self-describing protocol stream
    • 7.5.3 multistream-selector - self-describing protocol stream selector
    • 7.5.4 Stream Multiplexing
    • 7.5.5 Portable Encodings
• 8 Implementations
• 9 References