swarms/307-breaking-whiisper.md at 271ab8f1669a38beab87e431cee1f6024b1340a0

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Raw Blame History

id	title	status	created	category	lead-contributor	contributors	exit-criteria	success-metrics	clear-roles	future-iterations
307-breaking-whisper	Breaking Whisper	Draft	2018-09-24	swarm / SITG experiment	corpetty		no	yes	yes	yes

Preamble

Idea: 307-breaking-whisper
Title: SITG Experiment #2: Breaking Whisper
Status: Draft
Created: 2018-09-24

Summary

Understanding the limits of whisper (with and without optimizations)

Swarm Participants

Lead Contributor: @corpetty
Commited Contributors:
Suggested Contributors (??):
- Ivan: @divan
- Jakub: @jacob
- Jacek: @arnetheduck
- Mark: @easye
- Adam: @adamb

Overview

Approach finding the limits of whisper from a rigorous academic approach. See this for details. We will be using the Skin In The Game (SITG) model for incentivizing the work here. See this for more details on SITG.

Description

The concept is simple: We use whisper as a fundamental backbone to Status' communication, but we don't know how much of a load that backbone can support. Since this information does not exist, and there doesn't seem to be other people in the community focused on providing it, we must do it ourselves.

This endeavor outlines the process of systematically and rigorously evaluating the limitations, strengths, and weaknesses of Whisper as a communications protocol. It is then planned to use the results of this study to reason about future improvements of whisper and their prioritization, as well as what whisper's long term role within Status will be.

In an attempt to streamline and incentivize this process, as well as experiment with primitives of a DAO, we will be encapsulating this project with the SITG experiments, which are outlined in the above HackMD docs.

Requirements & Dependencies

Whisper Simulator and metrics

Milestones

Milestone 1: Simulation engine completion and metrics definition.

Goal Date: 2018- Description:

Completion of whispervis and the required stats as laid out in Overview HackMD doc, which are repeated here as follows:
- test capacity as
- number of nodes
- number of messages/sec
  - poisson distribution
- number of connections

a given message m_i has:
- size of message, m_{s,i}
  - poisson distribution
- proof of work, m_{pow, i}
- ttl, m_{ttl,i}
a given node, node, has:
- messages/sec rate, node_{v,i}
  - poisson distribution
- number of peers, node_{num\_p,i}
  - poisson distribution
    - reputation per peer link (spam)
      - dynamic based on devp2p
      - which means it can move within a given distribution
- topic bloom filter, node_{b,i} \exists [0,1]

The simulation aspect is not as important as the ability to run multiple tests with different parameters changed in a quick manner