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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

View all PL Research publications
2023-01-10 / White paper
Generalized Impact Evaluators
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
2022-12-13 / Conference paper
Enriching Kademlia by partitioning
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2022-11-07 / Journal article
To the InterPlanetary File System – and beyond!: Peer-to-peer file sharing would make the Internet far more efficient
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2022-09-28 / Conference paper
Decentralized hole punching
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
2022-07-26 / Conference paper
Design and evaluation of IPFS: A storage layer for the decentralized web
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-06-21 / Conference paper
Pulsarcast: Scalable, reliable pub-sub over P2P nets
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-06-21 / Conference paper
The case for AI based Web3 reputation systems
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-06-11 / Conference paper
IPFS-FAN: A function-addressable computation network
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
Networking , Distributed systems
2021-01-14 / Report
Accelerating content routing with Bitswap: A multi-path file transfer protocol in IPFS and Filecoin
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 synchronisation protocol.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-12-07 / Conference paper
PASTRAMI: Privacy-preserving, auditable, scalable & trustworthy auctions for multiple items
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-10-11 / Conference paper
Rewarding relays for decentralised NAT traversal using smart contracts
Traversing NAT’s 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
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-07-06 / Report
GossipSub: Attack-resilient message propagation in the Filecoin and ETH2.0 networks
Permissionless blockchain environments necessitate the use of a fast and attack-resilient message propagation protocol for Block and Transaction messages to keep nodes synchronised 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
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-06-12 / Conference paper
Automating QUIC interoperability testing
We present QuicInteropRunner [1,2], a test framework for automated and on-demand interoperability testing between implementations of the QUIC protocol [3]. 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
2020-04-27 /
Merkle-CRDTs: Merkle-DAGs meet CRDTs
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-04-18 / Report
Gossipsub-v1.1 evaluation report
Permissionless blockchain environments necessitate the use of a fast and attack-resilient message propagation protocol for Block and Transaction messages to keep nodes synchronised 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
Distributed systems , Networking

Blog

View all PL Research posts
2023-01-12 / Blog
Generalized Impact Evaluators, A year of experiments and theory
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
Distributed systems , Networking
2023-01-10 / Blog
Announcing the final award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"
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
Network Research
Distributed systems , Networking
2022-08-26 / Blog
Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2022
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
ConsensusLab , CryptoComputeLab , CryptoEconLab , Cryptonet , Network Research , ProbeLab , Research Acceleration
Cryptography , Distributed systems , Metaresearch , Networking
2022-08-08 / News, Grants
Announcing RFP-014: The one with private retrieval
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
Network Research
Distributed systems , Networking
2022-07-26 / Blog
Introducing ProbeLab
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
ProbeLab
Networking
2022-07-25 / Blog
Announcing the first award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"
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 acess to Web3 services by creating a better client interface and user experience for accessing Web3 content.
Karola Kirsanow
Network Research
Distributed systems , Networking
2022-01-12 / News
Decentralized internet, networks, protocols, and systems (DINPS) workshop at IEEE ICDCS 2022: call for contributions
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
ProbeLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-12-21 / Blog
Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 2
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
AbstractionLab , Cryptonet , ResNetLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems , Metaresearch , Networking
2021-12-13 / Blog
A visualization tool for the IPFS DHT
At the Mobile Multimedia Lab of the Athens University of Economics and Business, we have been working on optimisations for the InterPlanetary File System distributed hash table (IPFS DHT) and, in particular, on Multi-Level DHT support.
Spyros Voulgaris, Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-07-21 / News, Events
Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin (DI2F) — a report from the trenches
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
Networking , Distributed systems
2021-06-08
ResNetLab on Tour in Australia
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
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-06-08
ResNetLab presents Beyond Bitswap at Codemotion '21
ResNetLab was delighted to accept an invitation to talk about Bitswap and the outcomes of our Beyond Bitswap project at the Spanish Edition of the Codemotion conference. The invitation was then extended to the English edition of the conference, which took place at the end of May.
Alfonso de la Rocha
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-06-02 / Blog
ResNetLab presentations at Devfolio's ETH India 2021 Fellowship
Hot off the heels of ETHDenver, the largest Ethereum community event in North America, the Devfolio team who ran the hackathon platform for the event asked if we’d be interested in doing an IPFS training for another of their programs: the Devfolio Ethereum India Fellowship.
Dietrich Ayala, Alfonso de la Rocha , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-05-24 / News
Call for Participation: DI2F: Decentralizing the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin
The first edition of a research-focused workshop on decentralisation, IPFS, and Filecoin is here! DI2F is taking place alongside IFIP Networking 2021 on 21 June 2021 and has a packed programme full of interesting paper presentations, demos, abstracts, hands-on tutorials and invited talks!
Yiannis Psaras , Jorge M. Soares
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-05-13 / News
ResNetLab on Tour: Blockchain@Berkeley
We were delighted to present our brand new ResNetLab on Tour programme to the vibrant community of the Berkeley’s Blockchain Innovation Hub on April 28th and 29th! The ResNetLab on Tour programme is a one-stop-shop for all things IPFS and Web 3.
Dietrich Ayala, Alfonso de la Rocha , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-04-06 / News
ResNetLab on Tour tutorials go on-demand
We started the ResNetLab on Tour programme in late 2019 with the goal of onboarding the research and academic community to the IPFS architecture and the interesting open problems and research directions associated with the decentralisation of internet services.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-03-03 / News, Team
ResNetLab welcomes Barath Raghavan as a research advisor
We are pleased to announce that Barath Raghavan will be working with ResNetLab as an advisor. Barath is a professor of computer science at USC, where he co-leads the networked systems lab and conducts research across the fields of core networked systems, computing for social good and sustainability, and security.
Karola Kirsanow
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-02-03 / Event
Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin (DI2F) workshop at IFIP Networking 2021: Call for Contributions
Since the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) was first introduced in a 2014 whitepaper, interest from the research community on improving and building on its protocol stack has been steadily growing. A search for “IPFS networking” on Google Scholar now returns over 1500 results, and that is just a fraction of the relevant publications.
Yiannis Psaras , Jorge M. Soares
ResNetLab
Networking , Distributed systems
2021-01-20 / Blog
ResNetLab 2020 in review: we love it when a plan comes together
We hope you spent some fantastic time with your loved ones during the holiday season. With the time to pause, rest, and reflect – and with the goal of kicking off 2021 in the best way possible – we decided to capture ResNetLab’s 2020 highlights, share what we’ve learned, and describe what we will be focusing on in 2021.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-01-11 / Blog
Beyond Swapping Bits: project review (and preview!)
If you have been following along for the past three months (1, 2, 3, 4), you know that we in ResNetLab started the Beyond Bitswap project with one goal in mind: to drive speed-ups for file-sharing in IPFS.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2021-01-01 / Blog
Our Bitswap nodes have become “jumping inspectors” (updated)
A few weeks ago, we shared how we have taught our Bitswap nodes to jump. If you recall from that post, the content discovery range extension gained came at the expense of an increased number of duplicate blocks exchanged in the network.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-12-10 / Blog
Teaching Bitswap nodes to jump
By now you may have heard about ResNetLab’s research endeavour to drive speed-ups on file transfers: Beyond Swapping Bits. Our recent blog post, “Honey, I shrunk our libp2p streams”, considers how adding compression to libp2p could lead to significant bandwidth savings.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-11-03 / Blog
"Two ears, one mouth": how to leverage bitswap chatter for faster transfers
As part of ResNetLab’s research endeavour to drive speed-ups on file transfers, Beyond Swapping Bits, we present a new contribution to IPFS Bitswap protocol. We argue that Bitswap is currently discarding a wealth of information that could be used to its benefit, improving retrieval success and minimizing the latency to retrieve content.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-10-29 / Blog
Honey, I shrunk our libp2p streams
Today we’re excited to share the story of how we decided to explore compression for libp2p streams and ended up achieving up to a 75% decrease in bandwidth use when performing an IPFS file exchange.
Alfonso de la Rocha , David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-10-13 / News, Grants
Meet the latest Protocol Labs Research Grant recipients
In January of 2020, the Resilient Networks Lab (ResNetLab) launched two RFPs (Requests for Proposals) to address pressing open problems faced by IPFS and libp2p, namely, Routing at Scale and PubSub at Scale.
Jonathan Gross
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-10-06 / Blog
GossipSub: An attack-resilient messaging-layer protocol for public blockchains
Securing permissionless networks is the bane of open networks, starting with the Internet and every overlay network that operates over it. This challenge has existed from the early days of the Internet to the current Web 3.
Yiannis Psaras , David Dias
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-09-18 / Blog
A brief history of (re)building the Internet
The Internet began life as a military network engineered for resilience in the face of a nuclear attack. That’s right—the same network you use to check on your friends and share cat photos has at its core a structural pattern intended to survive a nuclear exchange long enough to mutually assure destruction with the USSR.
Guy Wuollet
Distributed systems , Networking
2020-07-23 / Blog
How content addressing can solve streaming challenges as networks are overloaded
Given the mass migration to remote work we’ve seen in recent months, you’d think the internet would be collapsing under the added strain. Yet precisely the opposite has happened. As experts have observed, the internet isn’t buckling under added traffic; it’s thriving.
Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Networking
2020-02-25 / News, Team
Yiannis Psaras joins Protocol Labs Research
Yiannis (Ioannis) is joining the Resilient Networks Lab, which he helped get off the ground after becoming an advisor to PL in July 2019. Yiannis is currently a fellow of the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and a Lecturer at University College London, where he has worked on a number of topics within the broad field of networking, with a significant focus on Information-Centric Networking (ICN).
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking
2019-12-30 / News
A new lab for resilient networks research
Resiliency is at the core of systems that are capable of standing the test of time, providing unshakable access for the many generations to come. A resilient system or network is fundamentally uncompromised by an isolated failure or network split.
David Dias , Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems , Networking