SCION-enabled IPFS and libp2p
Enhancing IPFS Performance and Resilience through SCION's Path-Aware Networking
SCION is a clean-slate Next-Generation Internet (NGI) architecture which offers a.o. multi-path and path-awareness capabilities by design. Moreover, SCION was designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communication. As a result, the SCION architecture provides strong resilience and security properties as an intrinsic consequence of its design. The goal in this project is to leverage the path-awareness in SCION to align the storage and lookup in IPFS with the underlying network in an optimal manner, while at the same time using SCION to establish trust between the entities.
- The project's own website: https://www.netsys.ovgu.de/
Why does this actually matter to end users?
The vast amount of content on the Internet has made it increasingly challenging for users to quickly and reliably access relevant information. A key issue in managing and retrieving information in distributed systems is locating data items in a manner that ensures scalability, minimal communication complexity, and high reliability, even in the presence of adversaries. Specifically, determining where to store information so that requesters can easily find it, as well as enabling users to discover and efficiently locate desired data items, are critical challenges.
Centralized approaches offer fast data lookup and constant search complexity but may suffer from scalability issues, single points of failure, and trust concerns. As a result, decentralized approaches are more desirable, although they often come with increased communication overhead. Recent solutions, such as the IPFS, address some of these problems but still have limitations in their performance, as discussed in the related efforts section below.
In this project, our objective is to create a secure, reliable, and decentralized storage platform based on IPFS, that outperforms existing approaches in terms of fast, scalable content search and lookup. By leveraging path-awareness, we aim to utilize network resources efficiently to reduce search and lookup delays while enhancing overall throughput.
Run by OVGU Magdeburg
This project was funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101092990.
