I have come up with a routing visualization diagram. The legend for it is located at: http://members.home.com/mwiktowy/freenet.legend.png
With all this talk of searching and update propagation and my inability to explain myself in words. I remembered the old axiom that "a picture is worth a thousand words" and put my internal visualization tool down onto virtual paper. It is flexible, uncluttered for fairly complex routing situations. It expresses the idea of key closeness, hops, node load, routing failures, internode bandwidth, "regions" where closeness based routing will be contained, "sectors" where nodes know of one another, and many many more concepts that are sometimes difficult to put into words all in a diagram that kind of looks like one of my blood-shot eyes after a night of drinking heavily :] I will offer a few words (referring to the legend above) to kick of your understanding of my scribble. Closeness - the closer a node is to the centre of the circle, the closer that a routed hash is to the "ideal" node or "Focus" (at point F). The existence of a Focus of course depends on your choice of routing algorithm but the diagram is defined at the extreme that there is an IP that will match better than (or be closer than) any other IP to a particular hash. This provides a baseline to visualize other routing techniques. Regions - the circle at B - all routed messages within this, that are routed closer to the message hash, will remain in this circle (by definition) - this is not a representation of a region in physical space but rather in "closeness" space. This is the same concept as "Islands of Key closeness" that has been expressed in the past. Where two regions intersect, routing might get a bit chaotic. Sectors - all nodes within a particular sector have references to one another. This has nothing to do with closeness but messages that are routed using a closeness metric will tend to stick within a tight sector shaped area on this diagram. Bandwidth - this can be represented with thicker lines for lots of internode bandwidth. Core - this inner region is where all nodes contain references to the focus node. You will note that, normally, routing only takes one hop to the focus in this region since there couldn't possibly be a closer node to route to. Further routing diagram examples may be found at: http://members.home.com/mwiktowy/freenet.examples.png These examples illustrate the usability of the diagrams but do not actually reflect the behaviour of the current or future freenet. Sources for these diagrams (after all, this is an open source project ;]) can be found at http://members.home.com/mwiktowy/<filename>.sk - for "sketch" vector drawing format or http://members.home.com/mwiktowy/<filename>.svg - for "scalable vector graphic" format I hope this aids in everyone's (newbie and developer a like) understanding of discussions of future Freenet proposals. Mike _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
