This section documents the implementation of the peer-to-peer (p2p)
communication layer in CometBFT.The documentation was produced
using the v0.34.* releases
and the branch v0.34.x
of this repository as reference.
As there were no substancial changes in the p2p implementation, the
documentation also applies to the releases v0.37.* and v0.38.*1.
The documentation follows the organization of the
p2p package,
which implements the following abstractions:
Transport: establishes secure and authenticated
connections with peers;
Switch: responsible for dialing peers and accepting
connections from peers, for managing established connections, and for
routing messages between the reactors and peers,
that is, between local and remote instances of the CometBFT protocols;
PEX Reactor: due to the several roles of this component, the
documentation is split in several parts:
Peer Exchange protocol: enables nodes to exchange peer addresses, thus implementing a peer discovery service;
Address Book: stores discovered peer addresses and
quality metrics associated to peers with which the node has interacted;
Peer Manager: defines when and to which peers a node
should dial, in order to establish outbound connections;
Types and Configuration provide a list of
existing types and configuration parameters used by the p2p package.
Footnotes
The releases v0.35.* and v0.36.*, which included a major
refactoring of the p2p layer implementation, were discontinued. ↩
