Research | ProbeLab Analytics

IEEE Spectrum v59 Journal Article · Nov 2022

To the InterPlanetary File System–and Beyond!: Peer-to-peer file sharing would make the Internet far more efficient

Yiannis Psaras · Jorge M. Soares · David Dias

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). That's because most of their networks were overprovisioned, with more capacity than they usually need. But in countries without the same level of investment in network infrastructure, the picture was less rosy: Internet service providers (ISPs) in South Africa and Venezuela, for instance, reported significant strain.

IEEE Internet Computing Journal Article · Sep 2022

Toward Decentralized Cloud Storage With IPFS: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Considerations

Trinh Viet Doan · Yiannis Psaras · Jörg Ott · Vaibhav Bajpai

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a novel decentralized storage architecture, which provides decentralized cloud storage by building on founding principles of P2P networking and content addressing. IPFS is used by more than 230k peers per week and serves tens of millions of requests per day, which makes it an interesting large-scale operational network to study. While it is used as a building block in several projects and studies, its inner workings, properties, and implications have only been marginally explored in research. Thus, we provide an overview of the IPFS design and its core features, along with the opportunities that it opens, as well as the challenges that it faces because of its properties. Overall, IPFS presents an interesting set of characteristics and offers lessons that can help build decentralized systems of the future.

SIGCOMM '22 Conference Paper · Aug 2022

Design and Evaluation of IPFS: A Storage Layer for the Decentralized Web

Dennis Trautwein · Aravindh Raman · Gareth Tyson · Ignacio Castro · Will Scott · Moritz Schubotz · Bela Gipp · Yiannis Psaras

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. In response to this, the "Decentralized Web" attempts to distribute ownership and operation of web services more evenly. This paper describes the design and implementation of the largest and most widely used Decentralized Web platform - the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) - an open-source, content-addressable peer-to-peer network that provides distributed data storage and delivery. IPFS has millions of daily content retrievals and already underpins dozens of third-party applications. This paper evaluates the performance of IPFS by introducing a set of measurement methodologies that allow us to uncover the characteristics of peers in the IPFS network. We reveal presence in more than 2700 Autonomous Systems and 152 countries, the majority of which operate outside large central cloud providers like Amazon or Azure. We further evaluate IPFS performance, showing that both publication and retrieval delays are acceptable for a wide range of use cases. Finally, we share our datasets, experiences and lessons learned.

ICDCSW '22 Conference Paper · Jul 2022

Enriching Kademlia by Partitioning

João Monteiro · Pedro Ákos Costa · João Leitão · Alfonso De la Rocha · Yiannis Psaras

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. To achieve this, the IPFS network leverages the Kademlia DHT to route and store pointers to content stored by network members (i.e., peers). However, due to the large number of network peers, content, and accesses, the DHT routing needs to be efficient and quick to enable a decentralized web that is competitive. In this paper, we present work in progress that aims at improving the Kademlia DHT performance through the manipulation of DHT identifiers by adding prefixes to identifiers. With this, we are able to bias the DHT topological organization towards locality (which can be either geographical or applicational), which creates partitions in the DHT and enables faster and more efficient query resolution on local content. We designed prototypes that implement our proposal, and performed a first evaluation of our work in an emulated network testbed composed of 5000 nodes. Our results show that our proposal can benefit the DHT look up on data with locality with minimal overhead.