waku.guide/docs/Concepts/different-protocols.md

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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. 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 and Peer Exchange ) 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. An extension of this is WAKU-RLN-RELAY: 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 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 is used to make fetching of a subset of messages more bandwidth preserving.
• WAKU-LIGHTPUSH is used for nodes with short connection windows and limited bandwidth to publish messages into the Waku network.