Layer-2-Overlay

Layer-2-Overlay is a P2P connectivity layer that allows decentralized applications to establish communication with peers. The current Internet architecture is strongly biased in favor of client-server applications. To regain data sovereignty from tech oligopoly, citizens must be able to communicate directly without a few gatekeepers. Therefore decentralized applications need to overcome network obstacles of the existing Internet infrastructure without the need to setup a costly alternative infrastructure. An additional benefit is the effective usage of existing resource, to lower the environmental damage big centralized systems are doing to our planetary ecosystem. The Layer-2-Overlay will achieve this goal by utilizing a variety of existing protocols and infrastructure (Ethernet/WLAN, TCP/UDP, QUIC, Satellite) and an effective flow- and congestion-control to distribute traffic through different channels. After reconnecting the edges (e.g. PCs at home or mobiles) of the existing Internet among each other again, traffic can be forwarded directly to known peers and existing infrastructure will be preserved. The API of Layer-2-Overlay will be usable by all kinds of decentralized application use cases. For a first showcase Layer-2-Overlay will be integrated into GNUnet, an alternative network stack for building secure, decentralized and privacy-preserving distributed applications.