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go-libp2p roadmap Q4’22/Q1’23

Date: 2022-10-07
Status: In Progress
Notes: This document is still in review will may be heavily modified based on stakeholder feedback. Please add any feedback or questions in:
https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/issues/1806

About the Roadmap

Sections

This document consists of two sections: Milestones and the Roadmap Appendix

Milestones is our best educated guess (not a hard commitment) around when we plan to ship the key features. Where possible we've broken down a project into discrete sub-projects e.g. project "A" (⚡Handshakes at the Speed of Light) contains three sub-projects and consists of A.1, A.2, and A.3 A project is signified as "complete" once all of it's sub-projects are shipped.

The Roadmap Appendix section describes each project in detail and lists its sub-projects (if applicable.) Here you can find the motivation for each project and goals.

We've deep-linked each section header to it's corresponding GitHub Epic. Latest information on the progress of each project there can be found in the Epics and their child issues (as we will make regular updates.)

Done criteria

Our "Definition of Done" for projects/sub-projects that involve writing new protocols or modifications to existing ones will usually consist of the following:

Spec is merged and classified as "Candidate Recommendation"
(by virtue of the above) At least one major reference implementation exists
A well established testing criteria (defined at the outset of the project) is met (testing via Testground or otherwise)
Public documentation (on docs.libp2p) exists

Others supporting projects (like testing or benchmarking) will have different criteria.

🛣️ Milestones

2022

Early Q4 (October)

A.1⚡Handshakes at the Speed of Light - Early Muxer Negotiation
E.1 🧪 Future-proof testing - RTT test for Early Muxer Negotiation

Mid Q4 (November)

F.1 ⏱ Future-proof Benchmarking - Using nix-builders

End of Q4 (December)

B.1 🧠 Smart Dialing - Happy Eyeballs
C 📊 Comprehensive Metrics - Swarm metrics
D.1 📺 Universal Browser Connectivity - WebRTC Browser -> Server

2023

Early Q1 (January)

B.2 🧠 Smart Dialing - QUIC Blackhole detector
A.2 ⚡ Handshakes at the Speed of Light - Adding security protocol

Mid Q1 (February)

B.3 🧠 Smart Dialing - RTT estimation
- 🎉 Estimated Project Completion

End of Q1 (March)

F.2 ⏱️ Future-proof benchmarking - Using first class support for remote runners in Testground
A.3 ⚡ Handshakes at the Speed of Light - 0.5 RTT data optimization (for QUIC)
- 🎉 Estimated Project Completion

Up Next

D.2 📺 Universal Browser Connectivity - WebTransport update to new draft versions
- Dependency on Chrome needs to support new draft version of WebTransport protocol (still under development by IETF and W3C)
E.2 🧪 Future-proof testing - Comprehensive testing for non-transport features
G 📢 Judicious Address Advertisements

Roadmap Appendix

A.⚡️Handshakes at the Speed of Light

Why: Historically, libp2p has been very wasteful when it comes to round trips spent during connection establishment. This is slowing down our users, especially their TTFB (time to first byte) metrics.

Goal: go-libp2p optimizes its handshake latency up to the point where only increasing the speed of light would lead to further speedups. In particular, this means:

Early Muxer Negotiation: cutting off the 1 RTT wasted on muxer negotiation
Adding security protocol: cutting off the 1 RTT wasted on security protocol negotiation by including the security protocol in the multiaddr
0.5 RTT data optimization: using 0.5-RTT data (for TLS) / a Noise Extension to ship the list of Identify protocols, cutting of 1 RTT that many protocols spend waiting on IdentifyWait

B. 🧠 Smart Dialing

Why: Having a large list of transports to pick from is great. Having an advanced stack that can dial all of them is even greater. But dialing all of them at the same time wastes our, the network’s and the peer’s resources.

Goal: When given a list of multiaddrs of a peer, go-libp2p is smart enough to pick the address that results in the most performant connection (for example, preferring QUIC over TCP), while also picking the address such that maximizes the likelihood of a successful handshake.

How:

Happy Eyeballs: implement some kind of “Happy-Eyeballs” style prioritization among all supported transports
QUIC Blackhole detector: detection of blackholes, especially relevant to detect UDP (QUIC) blackholing
RTT estimation: estimation of the expected RTT of a connection based on two nodes’ IP addresses, so that Happy Eyeballs Timeouts can be set dynamically

C. 📊 Comprehensive Metrics

Why: For far too long, go-libp2p has been a black box. This has hurt us many times, by allowing trivial bugs to go undetected for a long time (example). Having metrics will allow us to track the impact of performance improvements we make over time.

Goal: Export a wider set of metrics across go-libp2p components and enable node operators to monitor their nodes in production. Optionally provide a sample Grafana dashboard similar to the resource manager dashboard.

How: This will look similar to how we already expose resource manager metrics. Metrics can be added incrementally for libp2p’s components. First milestone is having metrics for the swarm.

D. 📺 Universal Browser Connectivity

Why: A huge part of “the Web” is happening inside the browser. As a universal p2p networking stack, libp2p needs to be able to offer solutions for browser users.

Goal: go-libp2p ships with up-to-date WebTransport and (libp2p-) WebRTC implementations, enabled by default. This allows connections between browsers and public nodes, browsers and non-public nodes as well as two browsers.

WebRTC: while browser to public node is getting close to finalized, there’ll be a push to make the other combinations work as well
WebTransport: as the protocol is still under development by IETF and W3C, our implementation needs to follow. To stay up to date, we will have to move as soon as Chrome ships support for a new draft version

E. 🧪 Future-proof Testing

Why: Having lots of transports, encryption mechanism, and stream muxers is great, and shaving off RTTs is awesome. We need to stay backwards-compatible with legacy go-libp2p release, other libp2p implementations, and less advanced libp2p stacks.

Goal: We have cross-version and cross-implementation Testground coverage that makes sure that we are able to establish a libp2p connection between two nodes, in the expected number of RTTs. This makes sure that the optimizations don’t break compatibility, actually have the performance impact we expect them to have, and serves as a regression test in the future.

RTT test for Early Muxer Negotiation (A.1)
Comprehensive testing for non-transport features (AutoNat, Hole punching, etc.)

F. ⏱ Future-proof Benchmarking

Why: For libp2p to be competitive, it needs to delivers comparable performance to widely used protocols on the internet, namely HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.

Goal: We have a test suite that runs libp2p transfers between nodes located at different locations all over the world, proving that libp2p is able to achieve performance on par with HTTP. The test suite is run on a continuous basis and results are published to a public performance dashboard.

Benchmarking using nix-builders
- (Dependency: remote machines need Nix installed)
Benchmarking using first class support for remote runners (using remote:exec) in Testground

G. 📢 Judicious Address Advertisements

Why: A node that advertises lots of addresses hurts itself. Other nodes will have to try dialing a lot of addresses before they find one that actually works, dramatically increasing handshake latencies.

Goal: Nodes only advertise addresses that they are actually reachable at.

How: Unfortunately, the AutoNAT protocol can’t be used to probe the reachability of any particular address (especially due to a bug in the go-libp2p implementation deployed years ago). Most likely, we need a second version of the AutoNAT protocol.

Libp2p Project Roadmap

Roadmap items in this document were sourced from our the overarching libp2p project roadmap: https://github.com/libp2p/specs/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

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