<aside> 📹 Measuring and benchmarking networks and network protocols is not an end, but a means to an end, which is to use the findings to: i) identify bottlenecks, ii) quantify the available space for improvement, and iii) design protocol optimizations.

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Introduction

The Protocol Benchmarking & Optimization Team (ProbeLab) is on a mission to measure the performance of Web3.0 network protocols, benchmark protocols against target performance milestones and propose improvements to their core design principles.

🎯 What is in scope: Our work focuses on internal network protocol logic, as well as cross-protocol interoperation and network architecture. We start from the protocol as an independent entity and dive into its mechanics. We then investigate the exogenous factors that influence the performance of the protocol, as well as the influence that this protocol has on other parts of the system. We specialize and work on network-layer protocols.

What is out of scope: We currently do not have the capacity to focus on implementation particulars, such as for example, software structure/architecture, memory consumption and CPU utilization, or performance of serialization techniques.

Projects and Planning

We coordinate work through this GH repository: ‣. Below is a board view of the list of items we have ongoing and which ones we’re planning to pick up next. Future Projects are those that we plan to work on in the future. If you’re interested to contribute to any of them make sure to get in touch. We do have funding available to support work on those projects. The list is roughly in order of priority by a combination of criticality, impact and complexity criteria.

Our Weekly Progress reports can be found here:

ProbeLab Weekly SitRep

ProbeLab Projects

Team

We are a community of researchers and engineers affiliated with PL’s EngRes team and several other academic and non-academic organizations.

PL EngRes: @Yiannis Psaras, @Guillaume Michel (guissou), @Dennis Trautwein, @Anonymous

How we work

We work in the open; our work and findings live primarily in GH and for the network measurements and IPFS Network Observatory project we use the following GH repository: https://github.com/protocol/network-measurements

Where appropriate, our results are reported technical reports, papers, blog posts and are always linked from this Notion page, which you can use as a point of reference to our work.

Where to find us