This document presents libp2p, a modularized and extensible network stack to overcome the networking challenges faced when doing peer-to-peer applications. libp2p is used by IPFS as its networking library.

Authors:

• Juan Benet
• David Dias

Reviewers:

• N/A

This describes the IPFS network protocol. The network layer provides point-to-point transports (reliable and unreliable) between any two IPFS nodes in the network.

This document defines the spec implemented in libp2p.

This RFC is organized by chapters described on the Table of contents section. Each of the chapters can be found in its own file.

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 Motivation
  • 1.2 Goals
• 2 An analysis the state of the art in network stacks
  • 2.1 The client-server model
  • 2.2 Categorizing the network stack protocols by solutions
  • 2.3 Current shortcommings
• 3 Requirements
  • 3.1 Transport agnostic
  • 3.2 Multi-multiplexing
  • 3.3 Encryption
  • 3.4 NAT traversal
  • 3.5 Relay
  • 3.6 Enable several network topologies
  • 3.7 Resource discovery
  • 3.8 Messaging
  • 3.9 Naming
• 4 Architecture
  • 4.1 Peer Routing
  • 4.2 Swarm
  • 4.3 Distributed Record Store
  • 4.4 Discovery
  • 4.5 Messaging
    • 4.5.1 PubSub
  • 4.6 Naming
    • 4.6.1 IPRS
    • 4.6.1 IPNS
• 5 Data structures
• 6 Interfaces
  • 6.1 libp2p
  • 6.1 Transport
  • 6.2 Connection
  • 6.3 Stream Multiplexer
  • 6.3 Swarm
  • 6.5 Peer Discovery
  • 6.2 Peer Routing
  • 6.2 Content Routing
    • 6.3.1 Distributed Record Store
  • 6.6 libp2p interface and UX
• 7 Properties
  • 7.1 Communication Model - Streams
  • 7.2 Ports - Constrained Entrypoints
  • 7.3 Transport Protocol
  • 7.4 Non-IP Networks
  • 7.5 On the wire
    • 7.5.1 Protocol-Multiplexing
    • 7.5.2 multistream - self-describing protocol stream
    • 7.5.3 multistream-selector - self-describing protocol stream selector
    • 7.5.4 Stream Multiplexing
    • 7.5.5 Portable Encodings
    • 7.5.6 Secure Communications
• 8 Implementations
• 9 References

• Relay
• PubSub

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