Status: draft

Context

When talking about networking topology, various options exist for building decentralized communication applications on the client side, including,

• Direct peer-to-peer (P2P) connections among network participants.
• Client/server (C/S) connections between user and service provider.

On server side, p2p connection is always preferred to remove central point of failure and maintain a decentralized network.

<aside> 💡 Note: Here Client means the application runs on user devices, usually behind a NAT, has limited online time and bandwidth. Server means the daemon process runs Waku protocol, helps with message availability and gossiping, usually has a public IP attached, always online and high bandwidth.

</aside>

To ensure the Waku network is preferred in building decentralized communication apps, there are a lot of requirements need to be met. Here list a few points which may relate to this doc,

• sending messages is stable, message loss is avoided, message is stored as expected.
• developer API is clear and easy to use.
• max decentralization is always possible when needed.

Client - P2P Connection via Libp2p

Pros:

• flexible to enable different protocols in the client, which could help with the messages availability and gossiping.
• ability to use more libp2p features, include different transport protocols such as wss, WebRTC and WebTransport, etc.
• no need to setup CORS which is usually a security concern in client/server model