Data Driven Protocol Design and Optimisation
Yiannis Psaras
About this talk
Yiannis Psaras opens the IPFS þing 2023 measurement track with an overview of ProbeLab's data-driven protocol design work across the IPFS network, walking through their core methodologies of DHT crawling, controlled probe fleets, and infrastructure log analysis. He recaps recent measurement campaigns including the Hydra dial-down experiment, the global hole-punching study with over six million attempts, the January 2023 incident in which more than 50% of IPFS DHT nodes became unresponsive, and the provider record liveness study that justified halving reprovide traffic in production from December 2022. The talk previews probelab.io as a public home for these results alongside stats.ipfs.network, and surveys ongoing optimization work including the double-hash DHT for reader privacy (IPIP-373), optimistic provide, and the IPFS magic numbers effort. Psaras closes by flagging GossipSub measurement, used heavily in Filecoin and Ethereum 2.0, as the team's next major focus area.