Design and Evaluation of IPFS: A Storage Layer for the Decentralized Web
Dennis Trautwein
About this talk
Dennis presents the SIGCOMM 2022 paper "Design and Evaluation of IPFS: A Storage Layer for the Decentralized Web," giving an overview of IPFS as a transport-agnostic, content-addressed system built around CIDs and walking through the anatomy of a CID (multibase, version, multicodec, multihash). He explains the content lifecycle in which a publisher writes a provider record mapping a CID to a peer ID into the Kademlia DHT while the data itself stays on the origin node, and a retriever first asks connected peers opportunistically before performing a DHT walk to fetch the provider and peer records. He then covers the measurement methodology — DHT crawls every 30 minutes, controlled probe nodes deployed across seven AWS regions, and public gateway logs — reporting roughly 464,000 unique IPs across 150+ countries and 2,700 ASes, heavy AS-level centralization with the top five hosting over 50% of IPs, churn distributions by country, and lookup latency where 80% of EU retrievals resolved under 500 ms. He contrasts 2021 publication latency of up to two minutes against current medians around six to seven seconds, attributes the improvement to a much larger stable-peer baseline (85-90% today vs. 55-60% in 2021), and closes by pointing to ProbeLab's ongoing weekly measurements at stats.ipfs.network and open future work on content availability, adverse network conditions, and routing latency.