Is IPFS Ready for Decentralized Video Streaming?
Zhengyu Wu, ChengHao Ryan Yang, Santiago Vargas, Aruna Balasubramanian · 2023
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer protocol for decentralized content storage and retrieval. The IPFS platform has the potential to help users evade censorship and avoid a central point of failure. IPFS is seeing increasing adoption for distributing various kinds of files, including video. However, the performance of video streaming on IPFS has not been well-studied. We conduct a measurement study with over 28,000 videos hosted on the IPFS network and find that video streaming experiences high stall rates due to relatively high Round Trip Times (RTT). Further, videos are encoded using a single static quality, because of which streaming cannot adapt to different network conditions.