Network

Agents can send messages to each other by send(identity, msg) where identity is an external identity, and they can handle received messages with some onRecv(msg) (to which messages addressed to them will be sent). We assume an asynchronous physical network in the general case, where liveness with regard to some message set and some agents will require eventual receipt of all messages in the set by the agents in question.

Note that sending to multiple identities can be accomplished by composition of identity by disjunction as defined previously, and blind broadcast can be accomplished by using the "all" identity. Messages (particularly those to the "all" identity) may also be prefixed with a topic (bytestring) such that agents can receive messages only for topics which they are interested.

A separate physical network abstraction layer is responsible for keeping appropriate routing tables to map external identities (including compositions thereof) to known IP addresses and route messages around. This physical layer has many specific optimisation concerns which are out of scope of the abstract specification.

TODO: Link to part of Typhon networking spec. Also, clearly define (somewhere) what entanglement data should be provided to / used by the physical network layer, this is probably important.

class Monad m => AgentContext m where
    send :: ExternalIdentity -> ByteString -> m ()
    onRecv :: (ByteString -> m ()) -> m ()

Messages

A Message is the lowest layer type, sent around between agents over the network using send and received with onRecv. There are four Message subtypes:

• Network P2P metadata requests and responses for physical network abstraction
• Storage read/write requests and responses for the distributed content-addressed data storage layer
• Compute requests and responses for the distributed content-addressed compute cache layer
• Observation messages, which capture partial ordering information used to craft the physical DAG

Messages may also be bundled together into a multi-message, which may carry specific semantics (e.g. a storage request could be bundled with payment).

data Message
  = NM NetworkMessage
  | SM StorageMessage
  | CM ComputeMessage
  | OM ObservationMessage
  | MM [Message]

The protocol orthogonalises correctness (verification) and efficiency concerns, such that Network, Storage, and Compute messages are independent of the actual ordering of data (physical DAG) and relations in question (logical DAG).

See next:

• Physical network abstraction
• Distributed content-addressed storage
• Distributed content-addressed compute