Module muxing

Muxing is the process of splitting a connection into multiple substreams.

The main item of this module is the StreamMuxer trait. An implementation of StreamMuxer has ownership of a connection, lets you open and close substreams.

Note: You normally don’t need to use the methods of the StreamMuxer directly, as this is managed by the library’s internals.

Each substream of a connection is an isolated stream of data. All the substreams are muxed together so that the data read from or written to each substream doesn’t influence the other substreams.

In the context of libp2p, each substream can use a different protocol. Contrary to opening a connection, opening a substream is almost free in terms of resources. This means that you shouldn’t hesitate to rapidly open and close substreams, and to design protocols that don’t require maintaining long-lived channels of communication.

Example: The Kademlia protocol opens a new substream for each request it wants to perform. Multiple requests can be performed simultaneously by opening multiple substreams, without having to worry about associating responses with the right request.

Implementing a muxing protocol

In order to implement a muxing protocol, create an object that implements the UpgradeInfo, InboundUpgrade and OutboundUpgrade traits. See the upgrade module for more information. The Output associated type of the InboundUpgrade and OutboundUpgrade traits should be identical, and should be an object that implements the StreamMuxer trait.

The upgrade process will take ownership of the connection, which makes it possible for the implementation of StreamMuxer to control everything that happens on the wire.

Structs

• Close
• StreamMuxerBox
  Abstract StreamMuxer.
• SubstreamBox
  Abstract type for asynchronous reading and writing.

Enums

• StreamMuxerEvent
  An event produced by a StreamMuxer.

Traits

• StreamMuxer
  Provides multiplexing for a connection by allowing users to open substreams.
• StreamMuxerExt
  Extension trait for StreamMuxer.