NSE — GNUnet documentation

# NSE

The NSE subsystem has the simplest API of all services, with only two calls: `GNUNET_NSE_connect` and `GNUNET_NSE_disconnect`.

The connect call gets a callback function as a parameter and this function is called each time the network agrees on an estimate. This usually is once per round, with some exceptions: if the closest peer has a late local clock and starts spreading its ID after everyone else agreed on a value, the callback might be activated twice in a round, the second value being always bigger than the first. The default round time is set to 1 hour.

The disconnect call disconnects from the NSE subsystem and the callback is no longer called with new estimates.

## Results

The callback provides two values: the average and the standard deviation of the last 64 rounds. The values provided by the callback function are logarithmic, this means that the real estimate numbers can be obtained by calculating 2 to the power of the given value (2average). From a statistics point of view this means that:

- 68% of the time the real size is included in the interval [(2average-stddev), 2]

- 95% of the time the real size is included in the interval [(2average-2*stddev, 2^average+2*stddev]

- 99.7% of the time the real size is included in the interval [(2average-3*stddev, 2average+3*stddev]

The expected standard variation for 64 rounds in a network of stable size is 0.2. Thus, we can say that normally:

- 68% of the time the real size is in the range [-13%, +15%]

- 95% of the time the real size is in the range [-24%, +32%]

- 99.7% of the time the real size is in the range [-34%, +52%]

As said in the introduction, we can be quite sure that usually the real size is between one third and three times the estimate. This can of course vary with network conditions. Thus, applications may want to also consider the provided standard deviation value, not only the average (in particular, if the standard variation is very high, the average maybe meaningless: the network size is changing rapidly).

## Examples

Let's close with a couple examples.

Average: 10, std dev: 1 Here the estimate would be

  2^10 = 1024 peers. (The range in which we can be 95% sure is: [2^8, 2^12] = [256, 4096]. We can be very (>99.7%) sure that the network is not a hundred peers and absolutely sure that it is not a million peers, but somewhere around a thousand.)

Average 22, std dev: 0.2 Here the estimate would be

  2^22 = 4 Million peers. (The range in which we can be 99.7% sure is: [2^21.4, 2^22.6] = [2.8M, 6.3M]. We can be sure that the network size is around four million, with absolutely way of it being 1 million.)

To put this in perspective, if someone remembers the LHC Higgs boson results, were announced with "5 sigma" and "6 sigma" certainties. In this case a 5 sigma minimum would be 2 million and a 6 sigma minimum, 1.8 million.

### The NSE Client-Service Protocol

As with the API, the client-service protocol is very simple, only has 2 different messages, defined in `src/nse/nse.h`:

- `GNUNET_MESSAGE_TYPE_NSE_START` This message has no parameters and is sent from the client to the service upon connection.

- `GNUNET_MESSAGE_TYPE_NSE_ESTIMATE` This message is sent from the service to the client for every new estimate and upon connection. Contains a timestamp for the estimate, the average and the standard deviation for the respective round.

When the `GNUNET_NSE_disconnect` API call is executed, the client simply disconnects from the service, with no message involved.

NSE Peer-to-Peer Protocol .. _The-NSE-Peer_002dto_002dPeer-Protocol:

### The NSE Peer-to-Peer Protocol

GNUNET_MESSAGE_TYPE_NSE_P2P_FLOOD The NSE subsystem only has one message in the P2P protocol, the `GNUNET_MESSAGE_TYPE_NSE_P2P_FLOOD` message.

This message key contents are the timestamp to identify the round (differences in system clocks may cause some peers to send messages way too early or way too late, so the timestamp allows other peers to identify such messages easily), the proof of work used to make it difficult to mount a Sybil attack, and the public key, which is used to verify the signature on the message.

Every peer stores a message for the previous, current and next round. The messages for the previous and current round are given to peers that connect to us. The message for the next round is simply stored until our system clock advances to the next round. The message for the current round is what we are flooding the network with right now. At the beginning of each round the peer does the following:

- calculates its own distance to the target value

- creates, signs and stores the message for the current round (unless it has a better message in the "next round" slot which came early in the previous round)

- calculates, based on the stored round message (own or received) when to start flooding it to its neighbors

Upon receiving a message the peer checks the validity of the message (round, proof of work, signature). The next action depends on the contents of the incoming message:

- if the message is worse than the current stored message, the peer sends the current message back immediately, to stop the other peer from spreading suboptimal results

- if the message is better than the current stored message, the peer stores the new message and calculates the new target time to start spreading it to its neighbors (excluding the one the message came from)

- if the message is for the previous round, it is compared to the message stored in the "previous round slot", which may then be updated

- if the message is for the next round, it is compared to the message stored in the "next round slot", which again may then be updated

Finally, when it comes to send the stored message for the current round to the neighbors there is a random delay added for each neighbor, to avoid traffic spikes and minimize cross-messages.