CLARIFICATION: Routing behaviour based on geographic proximity between network participants

[erikblues]

@rbirkner

And as an addendum: Why is it important to route to a random replica and not the geographically closest?
The IC can tolerate up to 1/3 of malicious nodes. If the boundary node would always route to the geographically closest replica, it might always route to a malicious node and the client had no straightway to “talk” to a benign replica.
By routing randomly to one of the replicas, there is a high chance that a client will reach a benign replica upon a retry.

This is actually really interesting and the first time I heard about this. Thanks for clarifying @rbirkner

What could be possible ways around that in the future?

If it could stay under 100ms that would already solve for 80% of the use-cases. And if it stayed in the 10ms-50ms range it would even solve for modern gaming/streaming requirements.

I tried starting a discussion about this issue a while ago, but it didn’t really pick up:

Proposal: Node Rewards, Replica Geolocation, Cycle-Tiers

Hello Dfinity Community, This topic is to discuss an improvement in the way ICP handles nodes and node rewards. Currently, we allocate full rewards to nodes, irrespective of whether they are actively providing cycles to the network. While this approach was initially intended to foster network growth and address the absence of an alternative system, it presents certain challenges and hinders transparency in assessing network demand. I believe we can solve this in a way that reduces latency in t…

Maybe because I had “proposal” in the title, which looking back is a bit misleading. I wanted to see the community discuss possible approaches and solutions to these issues.

I think this is important for many reasons:

• SEO: search engines rate webpages based on loading speeds, and ping plays an important role in that. So as long as there isn’t a solution for this, I’m forced to keep the frontpages of apps, blogs, etc hosted on web2.
• Streaming/voice: any form of streaming or voice-chat app needs decent ping, so randomly going between 30ms and 400ms doesn’t really work.
• Gaming: same thing. Any ping over 100ms makes pretty much any modern game unplayable. So if Dfinity is serious about going into that market, serving based on geolocation seems like a must have.

Either way, interested in where this discussion goes. What is your use case @saikatdas0790? is this causing issues for hot or not? Do you plan to add streaming?