The Protocol Benchmarking & Optimization Team (ProbeLab) is on a mission to measure the performance of Web3 network protocols, benchmark protocols against target performance milestones, and propose improvements to their core design principles.

Our work focuses on internal network protocol logic, as well as cross-protocol interoperation and network architecture. We start from the protocol as an independent entity and dive into its mechanics. We then investigate the exogenous factors that influence the performance of the protocol, as well as the influence that this protocol has on other parts of the system. We specialize and work on network-layer protocols.

Resources

• The ProbeLab website is available at https://probelab.io/
• You can find our Completed, Ongoing and Future projects in ProbeLab’s Notion page, where we currently organize our work.
• Our network measurement work and results lives in this GH repository: https://github.com/protocol/network-measurements. You can open issues and submit PRs for items of interest to your project/product.
• Our latest results are posted on the “Results” folder of the same repository.
• Our latest ACM Sigcomm 2022 paper includes a comprehensive description and internal details of the IPFS architecture, as well as a summary of our latest measurement campaign.

Team

• Yiannis Psaras (Lead)
• Guillaume Michel (Research Engineer)
• Dennis Trautwein (Research Engineer)
• Many wonderful external collaborators which you will find in the Notion page linked above.

Where to find us

• We frequent in the #probe-lab channel on the IPFS Discord Server
• We hold bi-weekly Office Hours, where we discuss items related to network measurements, protocol design and network architecture, primarily focused around IPFS, libp2p and occasionally Filecoin. Reach out to us if you want an invite.