rfc/content/docs/rfcs/30

slug	title	name	status	editor	contributors
30	30/ADAPTIVE-NODES	Adaptive nodes	draft	Oskar Thorén <oskar@status.im>

This is an informational spec that show cases the concept of adaptive nodes.

Node types - a continuum

We can look at node types as a continuum, from more restricted to less restricted, fewer resources to more resources.

Possible limitations

• Connectivity: Not publicly connectable vs static IP and DNS
• Connectivity: Mostly offline to mostly online to always online
• Resources: Storage, CPU, Memory, Bandwidth

Accessibility and motivation

Some examples:

• Opening browser window: costs nothing, but contribute nothing
• Desktop: download, leave in background, contribute somewhat
• Cluster: expensive, upkeep, but can contribute a lot

These are also illustrative, so a node in a browser in certain environment might contribute similarly to Desktop.

Adaptive nodes

We call these nodes adaptive nodes to highlights different modes of contributing, such as:

• Only leeching from the network
• Relaying messages for one or more topics
• Providing services for lighter nodes such as lightpush and filter
• Storing historical messages to various degrees
• Ensuring relay network can't be spammed with RLN

Planned incentives

Incentives to run a node is currently planned around:

• SWAP for accounting and settlement of services provided
• RLN RELAY for spam protection
• Other incentivization schemes are likely to follow and is an area of active research

Node protocol selection

Each node can choose which protocols to support, depending on its resources and goals.

In the case of protocols like 11/WAKU2-RELAY etc (12, 13, 19, 21) these correspond to Libp2p protocols.

However, other protocols like 16/WAKU2-RPC (local HTTP JSON-RPC), 25/LIBP2P-DNS-DISCOVERY, Discovery v5 (DevP2P) or interfacing with distributed storage, are running on different network stacks.

This is in addition to protocols that specify payloads, such as 14/WAKU2-MESSAGE, 26/WAKU2-PAYLOAD, or application specific ones. As well as specs that act more as recommendations, such as 23/WAKU2-TOPICS or 27/WAKU2-PEERS.

Waku network visualization

We can better visualize the network with some illustrative examples.

Topology and topics

The first one shows an example topology with different PubSub topics for the relay protocol.

Legend

The dotted box shows what content topics (application-specific) a node is interested in.

A node that is purely providing a service to the network might not care.

In this example, we see support for toy chat, a topic in Waku v1 (Status chat), WalletConnect, and SuperRare community.

Auxiliary network

This is a separate component with its own topology.

Behavior and interaction with other protocols specified in Vac RFCs, e.g. 25/LIBP2P-DNS-DISCOVERY, 15/WAKU-BRIDGE, etc.

Node Cross Section

This one shows a cross-section of nodes in different dimensions and shows how the connections look different for different protocols.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.