This project was done as part of the decentralized consensus fellowship at Insight Data Science. Full slides with images here.
The block propagation speedup network is an idea to reduce propagation time on decentralized networks which, by their nature, lead to non-optimal network topologies. Because there is no central authority, connections between peers are ad-hoc and can lead to situations where a large number of hops is required to propagate a message to all other peers. With financial infrastructure, low latency is always better.
The speedup network is created via a modified Terraform script which creates a specified count of Ec2 instances synced to the Zcash network but running a modified daemon which allows for custom outgoing connection counts (instead of the standard max of 20). The base repo can be found here. Speedup nodes connect to all nodes in the organic network as well as to each other, limiting the maximum hops between any two nodes to 3 Node->Speedup->Speedup->Node.
NodeConnection.py monitors the speedup network and removes peers which have connected to too many speedup nodes as to not perturbe the organic network.
The code supports experimentation since it is vital to the project to know if results are produced. The modified Zcash daemon supports an additional RPC command to silence/unsilence that node and the manager code automatically handles starting/stopping on a given block interval or time duration. Results are gathered using the Insight Fellowship's decentralized consensus lab observatory nodes which can be found at this link. Analysis is run in the included notebooks.
See slides for detailed graphs. Results are gathered from experiment (on) and control (off) periods of roughly 3 hours each to account for natural variation.
If you are interested in running the network please reach out to me at leuyangh@gmail.com. I'm happy to send all resources left out of the repo as long as I know when another speedup network is running so ongoing experiments aren't interfered with.
All resolved
[]Better management tool interface []Push TF script and make speedup node AMI public