Detail

Design and performance evaluation of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a Decentralized Storage and Delivery Network

The last decade has seen dramatic centralisation of Internet services. Storage, bandwidth and compute are now largely provided by a handful of companies. To counter this trend, the research community has proposed many decentralized alternatives.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS – ipfs.io), along with libp2p (libp2p.io) and other supporting protocols and libraries, has taken center stage in this movement and has become the de facto standard for research, experimentation, and development of decentralised storage and delivery platforms. IPFS is an open membership (permissionless), content-addressable, peer-to-peer network protocol. The IPFS protocol stack is open-source with a vibrant community of thousands of contributors, a network size of 250,000 monthly nodes and a rapidly growing ecosystem of companies that build on top of the IPFS protocol stack.

In this talk we will introduce the building blocks of IPFS, how the overall system works and we will finally point to some of our latest findings from a large measurement campaign that we carried out recently. Our detailed measurement methodology and experimentation has revealed several important findings, such as the retrieval latency from several geographic regions, the churn rate of the P2P network, but also bottlenecks in the performance of the system.