DiscoveryCommunity.md

Discovery Community

DiscoveryCommunity implements the peer discovery mechanism. It tries to keep an active connection with a specified number of peers (30 by default) and keeps track of communities they participate in. It performs regular keep-alive checks and drops inactive peers. While it is possible to run IPv8 without using this community, it is not recommended.

Similarity Request

field	size	type
auth	variable	BinMemberAuthenticationPayload
dist	8 bytes	GlobalTimeDistributionPayload
payload	variable	SimilarityRequestPayload
signature	32 bytes	byte array

SimilarityRequestPayload

field	size	type	description
identifier	2 bytes	unsigned short	A number that must be given in the associated similarity response
LAN address	4 bytes	Address	The LAN address of the sender
WAN address	4 bytes	Address	The WAN address of the sender
connection type	1 byte	byte	The connection type of the sender
preference list	variable	byte array	The concatenated list of service IDs supported by the sender

Similarity Response

field	size	type
auth	variable	BinMemberAuthenticationPayload
dist	8 bytes	GlobalTimeDistributionPayload
payload	variable	SimilarityResponsePayload
signature	32 bytes	byte array

SimilarityResponsePayload

field	size	type	description
identifier	2 bytes	unsigned short	A number that was given in the associated similarity request
preference list	variable	byte array	The concatenated list of service IDs supported by the sender

Ping

field	size	type
dist	8 bytes	GlobalTimeDistributionPayload
payload	variable	PingPayload

PingPayload

field	size	type	description
identifier	2 bytes	unsigned short	A number that must be given in the associated pong

Pong

field	size	type
dist	8 bytes	GlobalTimeDistributionPayload
payload	variable	PongPayload

PongPayload

field	size	type	description
identifier	2 bytes	unsigned short	A number that was given in the associated ping