---
title: Message Segmentation and Reconstruction
name: Message Segmentation and Reconstruction
tags: [waku-application, segmentation]
version: 0.1
status: draft
---

## Abstract

This specification defines an application-layer protocol for **segmentation** and **reconstruction** of messages carried over a transport/delivery service with a message-size limitation, when the original payload exceeds said limitation.
Applications partition the payload into multiple transport messages and reconstruct the original on receipt,
even when segments arrive out of order or up to a **predefined percentage** of segments are lost.
The protocol optionally uses **Reed–Solomon** erasure coding for fault tolerance.
All messages are wrapped in a `SegmentMessageProto`, including those that fit in a single segment.
Implementations **MAY** opt into a [backwards-compatible mode](#backwards-compatibility) that exempts small payloads from wrapping.

## Motivation

Many message transport and delivery protocols impose a maximum message size that restricts the size of application payloads.
For example, Waku Relay typically propagates messages up to **150 KB** as per [64/WAKU2-NETWORK - Message](https://rfc.vac.dev/waku/standards/core/64/network#message-size).
To support larger application payloads, a segmentation layer is required.
This specification enables larger messages by partitioning them into multiple envelopes and reconstructing them at the receiver.
Erasure-coded parity segments provide resilience against partial loss or reordering.

## Terminology

- **original payload**: the full application payload before segmentation.
- **data segment**: one of the partitioned chunks of the original message payload.
- **parity segment**: an erasure-coded segment derived from the set of data segments.
- **segment message**: a wire-message whose `payload` field carries a serialized `SegmentMessageProto`.
- **`segmentSize`**: configured maximum size in bytes of each data segment's `payload` chunk (before protobuf serialization).

The key words **"MUST"**, **"MUST NOT"**, **"REQUIRED"**, **"SHALL"**, **"SHALL NOT"**, **"SHOULD"**, **"SHOULD NOT"**, **"RECOMMENDED"**, **"NOT RECOMMENDED"**, **"MAY"**, and **"OPTIONAL"** in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC 2119](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt).

## Wire Format

Each segmented message is encoded as a `SegmentMessageProto` protobuf message:

```protobuf
syntax = "proto3";

message SegmentMessageProto {
  // Keccak256(original payload), 32 bytes
  bytes  entire_message_hash    = 1;

  // Data segment indexing
  uint32 index                  = 2; // zero-based sequence number; valid only if segments_count > 0
  uint32 segments_count         = 3; // number of data segments

  // Segment payload (data or parity shard)
  bytes  payload                = 4;

  // Parity segment indexing (used if segments_count == 0)
  uint32 parity_segment_index   = 5; // zero-based sequence number for parity segments
  uint32 parity_segments_count  = 6; // number of parity segments
}
```

**Field descriptions:**

- `entire_message_hash`: A 32-byte Keccak256 hash of the original complete payload, used to identify which segments belong together and verify reconstruction integrity.
- `index`: Zero-based sequence number identifying this data segment's position (0, 1, 2, ..., segments_count - 1).
- `segments_count`: Total number of data segments the original message was split into.
- `payload`: The actual chunk of data or parity information for this segment.
- `parity_segment_index`: Zero-based sequence number for parity segments.
- `parity_segments_count`: Total number of parity segments generated.

A message is either a **data segment** (when `segments_count > 0`) or a **parity segment** (when `segments_count == 0`).

### Validation

Receivers **MUST** enforce:

- `entire_message_hash.length == 32`
- **Data segments:**
  `segments_count >= 1` **AND** `index < segments_count`
- **Parity segments:**
  `segments_count == 0` **AND** `parity_segments_count > 0` **AND** `parity_segment_index < parity_segments_count`

No other combinations are permitted.
A `SegmentMessageProto` with `segments_count == 1` and `index == 0` is a valid single-segment data message: the `payload` field carries the entire original payload (see [Sending](#sending)).

## Segmentation

### Sending

To transmit a payload, the sender:

- **MUST** compute a 32-byte `entire_message_hash = Keccak256(original_payload)`.
- **MUST** split the payload into one or more **data segments**,
  each of size up to `segmentSize` bytes.
  A payload of size ≤ `segmentSize` produces a single data segment (`segments_count == 1`).
- **MAY** use Reed–Solomon erasure coding at the predefined parity rate.
- Encode each segment as a `SegmentMessageProto` with:
  - The `entire_message_hash`
  - Either data-segment indices (`segments_count`, `index`) or parity-segment indices (`parity_segments_count`, `parity_segment_index`)
  - The raw payload data
- Send each segment as an individual transport message according to the underlying transport protocol,
  preserving application-level metadata (e.g., content topic).

This yields a deterministic wire format: every transmitted payload is a `SegmentMessageProto`. Implementations introducing segmentation into a deployment with peers that predate this specification **MAY** instead operate in [backwards-compatible mode](#backwards-compatibility).

### Receiving

Upon receiving a segmented message, the receiver:

- **MUST** validate each segment according to [Wire Format → Validation](#validation).
- **MUST** cache received segments
- **MUST** attempt reconstruction when the number of available (data + parity) segments equals or exceeds the data segment count:
  - Concatenating data segments if all are present, or
  - Applying Reed–Solomon decoding if parity segments are available.
- **MUST** verify `Keccak256(reconstructed_payload)` matches `entire_message_hash`.
  On mismatch,
  the message **MUST** be discarded and logged as invalid.
- Once verified,
  the reconstructed payload **SHALL** be delivered to the application.
- Incomplete reconstructions **SHOULD** be garbage-collected after a timeout.

---

## Backwards Compatibility

Implementations **MAY** support a **backwards-compatible mode**, intended for deployments where this specification is being introduced incrementally and some peers do not yet implement segmentation.
The mode is controlled by the `backwardsCompatible` configuration option, which defaults to `false`.

When `backwardsCompatible = true`, the [Sending](#sending) procedure is amended as follows:

- Payloads with size **≤ `segmentSize`** **SHALL** be transmitted unmodified, i.e., not wrapped in `SegmentMessageProto`.
- Payloads exceeding `segmentSize` are wrapped and sent unchanged from [Sending](#sending).

A receiver that interoperates with senders operating in this mode **MUST** accept both wrapped and unwrapped payloads on the same channel.
A payload that does not parse as a valid `SegmentMessageProto` is treated as an unsegmented original payload and delivered directly to the application.

**Trade-off.**
This mode preserves on-the-wire compatibility with peers that cannot decode `SegmentMessageProto`, at the cost of the deterministic wire format described in [Sending](#sending).
Once all peers in a deployment implement this specification, `backwardsCompatible` **SHOULD** be set to `false`.

---

## Implementation Suggestions

### Reed–Solomon

Implementations that apply parity **SHALL** use fixed-size shards of length `segmentSize`.
The last data chunk **MUST** be padded to `segmentSize` for encoding.
The reference implementation uses **nim-leopard** (Leopard-RS) with a maximum of **256 total shards**.

### Storage / Persistence

Segments **MAY** be persisted (e.g., SQLite) and indexed by `entire_message_hash` and by sender. Sender MAY be authenticated, this is out of scope of this spec.
Implementations **SHOULD** support:

- Duplicate detection and idempotent saves
- Completion flags to prevent duplicate processing
- Timeout-based cleanup of incomplete reconstructions
- Per-sender quotas for stored bytes and concurrent reconstructions

### Configuration

- `segmentSize` — maximum size in bytes of each data segment's payload chunk (before protobuf serialization).
    **REQUIRED** parameter, configurable by the client.
- `parityRate` — fraction of parity shards relative to data shards.
    Configurable by the client. Defaults to **0.125** (12.5%).
- `maxTotalSegments` — maximum number of total shards (data + parity) per message.
    Implementation-specific parameter, fixed. The reference implementation uses **256**.

**Reconstruction capability:**
With the predefined parity rate,
reconstruction is possible if **all data segments** are received or if **any combination of data + parity** totals at least `dataSegments` (i.e., up to the predefined percentage of loss tolerated).

**API simplicity:**
Libraries **SHOULD** require only `segmentSize` from the application for normal operation.

### Support

- **Language / Package:** Nim;
  **Nimble** package manager
- **Intended for:** application-layer use over any transport with message-size constraints

---

## Security Considerations

### Privacy

`entire_message_hash` enables correlation of segments that belong to the same original message but does not reveal content.
To prevent this correlation, applications **SHOULD** encrypt each segment after segmentation (see [Encryption](#encryption)).
Traffic analysis may still identify segmented flows.

### Encryption

This specification does not provide confidentiality.
Applications **SHOULD** encrypt each segment after segmentation
(i.e., encrypt the serialized `SegmentMessageProto` prior to transmission),
so that `entire_message_hash` and other identifying fields are not visible to observers.

### Integrity

Implementations **MUST** verify the Keccak256 hash post-reconstruction and discard on mismatch.

### Denial of Service

To mitigate resource exhaustion:

- Limit concurrent reconstructions and per-sender storage
- Enforce timeouts and size caps
- Validate segment counts (≤ 256)
- Consider rate-limiting at the transport layer (for example, via [17/WAKU2-RLN-RELAY](https://rfc.vac.dev/waku/standards/core/17/rln-relay) on Waku)

### Compatibility

Nodes that do **not** implement this specification cannot reconstruct large messages.

---

## Deployment Considerations

**Overhead:**

- Bandwidth overhead ≈ the predefined parity rate from parity (if enabled)
- Additional per-segment overhead ≤ **100 bytes** (protobuf + metadata)

**Network impact:**

- Larger messages increase transport traffic and storage;
  operators **SHOULD** consider policy limits

---

## References

1. [10/WAKU2 – Waku](https://rfc.vac.dev/waku/standards/core/10/waku2)
2. [11/WAKU2-RELAY – Relay](https://rfc.vac.dev/waku/standards/core/11/relay)
3. [14/WAKU2-MESSAGE – Message](https://rfc.vac.dev/waku/standards/core/14/message)
4. [64/WAKU2-NETWORK](https://rfc.vac.dev/waku/standards/core/64/network#message-size)
5. [nim-leopard](https://github.com/status-im/nim-leopard) – Nim bindings for Leopard-RS (Reed–Solomon)
6. [Leopard-RS](https://github.com/catid/leopard) – Fast Reed–Solomon erasure coding library
7. [RFC 2119](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt) – Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels