This milestone serves the purpose of setting the methodology plan for the rest of the project. The milestone includes reviewing of the suggested methodology and the code that needs to be implemented in order to get the right results. This is the right time to make amendments to the suggested methodology. Given that there is a suggested methodology, this Milestone does not come with a reward, but should be part of the work.

Methodology details

<h3>Initial results/PoC:</h3>These results and the initial development help in order to judge whether we’re on the right track, or if adjustments need to be made. The purpose of this milestone is to identify whether we have enough detail, or if more detail needs to be integrated in the system, whether we will be able to extract the information we need by the final software and results, or if any readjustment needs to be done to the strategy followed.

Initial Results / Proof of Concept

<h3>Reproducible Experiments:</h3>Anyone should be able to reproduce the experiments done by the team. This is especially important for this project, as the dynamics and structure of the IPFS network changes over time and hence, engineering teams, or community members should be able to re-run the experiments in the future. <ol><li>Any code developed for this project should be migrated, or at least linked from the main GH repository: https://github.com/protocol/network-measurements.</li><li>The code should include detailed documentation/instructions on how to use the developed software, as well as contact details of the team.</li></ol> This milestone is expected before the end of the project and is not expected to be the final software. Updates can be done to the software and documentation after this milestone too. The milestone is needed in order for our team to carefully review the code, the code comments, as well as the HOWTO guide and provide feedback/ask for revisions in case things are not clear.

Reproducible Experiments & Stable Results

<h3>Final Report:</h3>We expect a final report that details the main findings which address the Request for Measurements (RFM), the methodology used,&nbsp;as well as any conclusions made and open issues for future investigation. The report is not expected to be long - think of a relatively detailed blogpost. The Final Report should be posted on the GH repository in the designated folder.

Final Report

Bitswap is involved in the content discovery process and precedes the DHT walk. Nodes ask all of their connected peers for the CID they're interested in, wait for 1sec to receive responses and in case of a negative result resort to the DHT. We argue that the 1sec delay is too long to wait for, unless the chances of finding content are high. We suspect that unless content is popular, then the vast majority of Bitswap discovery attempts are unsuccessful and add a significant delay to the discovery process. Our latest results show that content discovery through the DHT (DHT walk) can be pretty fast - in many cases sub-second. Adding an extra 1sec increases the discovery time by at least 50% in all cases, reaching up to 100% in many cases. Unless we find that the Bitswap content discovery success rate is worth the wait, we propose to parallelize the content discovery process through Bitswap and the DHT, or make it a user-set option. Additional context can be found in <a href="https://pl-strflt.notion.site/Effectiveness-of-Bitswap-Discovery-Process-aab515ebc1774bee8193da415bfb98f4" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">this Notion doc</a>. By figuring out the correct setting for the interplay between the Bitswap and the DHT discovery process, the community and ecosystem will gain significantly in terms of content discovery performance. If our hypothesis is correct, the content discovery latency can be reduced by 50-100%.

Bitswap is involved in IPFS's content discovery and precedes the DHT walk. This step adds a delay of 1sec before content is resolved through the DHT. We want to find out whether this delay is worth by investigating Bitswap's success rate.

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