EPF5: Week 17

This will be a shorter update. I will report on the IDONTWANT simulation results and briefly elaborate on the plan for next week.

IDONTWANT sims

Last week, I ran a few simulations on IDONTWANT. In short: I ran several simulations to compare average bandwidth between 3/6 and 4/8 blobs (target/max), with different ratios of nodes with and without IDONTWANT support. For this, I modified Lighthouse to be able to enable and disable IDONTWANT aka Gossipsub 1.2.0. IDONTWANT allows nodes to signal to peers that a certain message has already been received and does not need to be gossiped to the node. This allows us to save some bandwidth in some cases, as blobs are rather large.

The first attempt surprised me, as higher IDONTWANT usage caused higher bandwidth use! Please checkout my Interim IDONTWANT sim report for more details.

However, after adjusting the simulation a bit, results looked more promising: IDONTWANT bandwidth simulation results. Unfortunately, in my simulations IDONTWANT does not decrease the bandwidth usage as much as a blob adjustment increases it. Also, this simulation series again shows that it is hard assess how realistic the simulation is. In this case, it took some modification to have more realistic timing of the messages sent, as well as a reduction of latency between nodes.

In conclusion, the biggest weakpoints of my simulations seem to be (as assessed in the interim report):

• Too simple network topology / Latency too even between nodes
• Delays caused by computations are not modeled

Next week

I talked to my mentor Pop about the next steps. As mentioned last week, I want to make ethshadow ready for everyone to use. This week, I finish some initial refactoring and will try out every client and see if they run under shadow. I will also get started with documentation.

The weeks after I will (in rough order of priority) further focus on documentation and clean up the code as much as possible. Investigating possible ways to improve realism of the simulated network is also promising. Finally, I want to get as many clients as I can to work.