PeerDiscovery.md

Peer Discovery

We are going to use static peering for bootstrap and gossip protocol of state sharing. For gossip protocols, lightweight protocols are often preferred, such as UDP. UDP is a connectionless and lightweight transport protocol that can be suitable for gossip protocols. It allows for quick communication between peers without the overhead of establishing and maintaining connections.

NetworkDiscoveryNode

The BlockchainNetworkDiscovery interface defines methods for discovering peers, retrieving network peers, and processing incoming messages.

type BlockchainNetworkDiscovery interface {
    DiscoverPeers(ctx context.Context)
    GetNetworkPeers() []model.Peer
    ProcessMessage(message *NodeUpdate)
}

• ProcessMessage: The ProcessMessage method of BlockchainNode processes incoming node update messages. It checks the source and performs add or remove operations accordingly.
• DiscoverPeers:The DiscoverPeers method initiates the gossip mechanism to periodically broadcast the node's information to a random subset of other nodes.

PeerDiscoveryClient

The PeerDiscoveryClient interface defines method for sending discovered peers to other nodes.

type PeerDiscoveryClient interface {
        SendDiscoveredPeers(sourceId string, destination model.Peer, discoveredPeers []model.Peer) error
        Close() error
    }

PeerDiscoveryServer

The PeerDiscoveryServer interface defines a method for handling incoming messages from peers.

    type PeerDiscoveryServer interface {
        HandleIncomingMessage(conn io.Reader) error
    }