On the Feasibility of Using Network Coding in IPFS

Abstract

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) has emerged in 2015 as a promising peerto-peer (P2P) distributed file-sharing system poised to become the backbone of Web3.However, its BitSwap protocol, responsible for block exchange, encounters redundancy issues when multiple peers respond with duplicate blocks.To address this limitation, we propose CodedBitSwap, an innovative network coding-based data exchange protocol that integrates Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) into BitSwap.Considering that RLNC operations incur additional computational overhead, the RLNC-based protocol is designed with careful attention to its computational complexity that is investigated through trial experiments guiding the selection of coding parameters and structures.To assess the feasibility and performance of CodedBitSwap, an experimental evaluation that compares it with BitSwap was conducted in different scenarios xv using a controlled testbed environment consisting of 11 nodes exchanging three files of different sizes.During file exchange, the amount of data transmitted, download time, and encoding and decoding times were measured for each node.The evaluation results demonstrate that CodedBitSwap effectively eliminates redundancy at a relatively low cost of increased download time.The introduced RLNC computational complexity was optimized by the generation-based design strategy that minimizes it, ensuring that the cost of the reduced redundancy remains relatively low.The undertaken design methodology of CodedBitSwap offers a practical approach for future systems, which balances the overhead of RLNC coding with the benefits it brings.This work contributes to the advancement of network coding in P2P networks and demonstrates its potential to improve the efficiency of IPFS, opening up avenues for future research.