---
title: Different Types of Protocols in Waku
---

Waku is modular: several protocols are available and applications can decide on how they want to turn the dials on the [Anonymity Trilemma](https://freedom.cs.purdue.edu/projects/trilemma.html). Here are the different types of protocols Waku offers:

## 1. Discovery Domain

Node discovery is the mechanism that enables a Waku node to find other nodes. Waku is a modular protocol, several discovery mechanisms are and will be included in Waku (eg: [`Discv5`](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/33/) and [`Peer Exchange`](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/34/) ) so that developers can select the best mechanism(s) based for their use case and the user’s environment (e.g. mobile phone, desktop browser, server, etc).

## 2. Gossip Domain

Gossipsub is named after the fact that in a pub-sub network, the peers gossip to each other about which messages they have seen and use this information to maintain a message delivery network.

Waku is using gossiping to disseminate messages throughout the network using [`WAKU-RELAY`](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/11/).
An extension of this is [`WAKU-RLN-RELAY`](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/17/): an experimental privacy-preserving economic spam protection mechanism.

## 3. Request/Response Domain

In addition to the Gossip domain, Waku provides a set of Request/Reply protocols. They are primarily used in order to get Waku to run in resource restricted environments, such as low bandwidth or being mostly offline.

- [`WAKU-STORE`](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/13/) is used to fetch historical messages for mostly offline devices.

:::info There is also an experimental fault-tolerant addition to the store protocol (WAKU-FT-STORE) that relaxes the high availability requirement.

- [`WAKU-FILTER`](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/12/) is used to make fetching of a subset of messages more bandwidth preserving.
- [`WAKU-LIGHTPUSH`](https://rfc.vac.dev/spec/19/) is used for nodes with short connection windows and limited bandwidth to publish messages into the Waku network.