Broadcast

Although I have not actually done any work on the code since my last post because of educational commitments but I am looking forward to making some changes and perfecting the code.

One of the key concerns in designing a peer to peer network is the scope of messages that are sent from one peer to another. Presently there is local messaging from one peer directly to another peer and relaying of messages to other peers though other peers.

There is another form of messaging that could have great potential in peer to peer network. broadcast. This also has the potential to overload a network and destroy its usefulness.

There are two main ways of overcoming this problem in my mind. To understand these you have to understand how broadcast would be implemented in gourami. It would essentailly use the same message path format of the noraml message in gourami. That is user1/user2/user3[protocol]{message}user4/user5/user6. The difference would be that any * would be inteprerated as "broadcast". So a broadcast message would look like: */*/*[protocol]{message}user4/user5/user6. Each itteration from peer to peer would add to the sender path just as ususal but it would be able to exponentially propogate though the network. This could be a problem, or extremly usefull.
Spammers may use many * - hops to achieve broad network coverage but doing so would overload the network and flood it with spam messages. To reduce this each peer to check the number of broadcast hops and do either of two things: stop messages that have more than the specified number of hops to go, or change the number of hops to go to the maximum allowable number. I am very hesitant to allow peers to transparently change messages although that could be implemented by anyone. I think either option, or no checking should all be available. Most peers will probably only allow 1 or two levels of broadcast.