Performance challenges of decentralised services

Decentralised, peer-to-peer based services present a variety of security and privacy benefits for their users, and highly scalable to cater for a growing numbers of users, without extra servers being required of the service operator. This presents a significant advantage for newly emerging mobile applications (with high numbers of users, and limited funds for infrastructure), although performance is a challenge when accessing decentralised services. In this paper, we firstly show the performance of our implementation of a decentralised chunk-based storage platform is constrained by the network. We show the impact of network latency on the performance of this decentralised storage solution, and propose our solution to this, in the form of a federated, intermediary server, thus creating a hybrid decentralised service. This approach offers relatively constant performance as latency increases, due to the use of TCP connectivity, while ensuring the advantages of the decentralised service are not lost in the process.