Quantifying the Performance of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types in InterPlanetary File System
Keywords: P2P Storage Systems, Replication, Consistency, CRDT, IPFS, Performance Evaluation
TL;DR: This paper provides a quantitative measurements of the performance of Merkle-CRDTs in IPFS.
Abstract: The continuous growth in data volume increases the interest in using peer-to-peer (P2P) systems not only to store static data (i.e., immutable data) but also to store and share mutable data -- data that are updated and modified by multiple users. Unfortunately, current P2P systems are mainly optimized to manage immutable data. Thus, each modification creates a new copy of the file, which leads to a high "useless'' network usage. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are specific data types built in a way that mutable data can be managed without the need for consensus-based concurrency control. A few studies have demonstrated the potential benefits of integrating CRDTs in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), an open-source widely used P2P content sharing system. However, they have not been implemented and evaluated in a real IPFS deployment. This paper tries to fill the gap between theory and practice and provides a quantitative measurement of the performance of CRDTs in IPFS. Accordingly, we introduce IM-CRDT, an implementation of CRDTs in IPFS that focuses on the simple data type (i.e., Set); and carry out extensive experiments to verify whether CRDTs can efficiently be utilized in IPFS to handle mutable data. Experiments on Grid'5000 show that IM-CRDT reduces the data transfer of an update by up to 99.96% and the convergence time by 54.6%-62.6%. More importantly, we find that IM-CRDT can sustain low convergence time under concurrent updates.
Submission Number: 10
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