As the ARPANET transitioned to the public internet, the client-server architecture became prominent. This was driven by various technological limitations of the early 1990s:  the high cost of computing made the thin-client fat-server architecture inevitable the high cost of memory and storage promoted centralization, i.e. clients were consumers of information, while servers were storage houses bandwidth is a very limited resource, and given the client-server architecture, ISPs provide asymmetric bandwidths that have better DL (downlink) speeds compared to UL (uplink) speeds. Further as scaling the internet continued to increase the addressable range of the IPv4, NAT units were introduced into the internet architecture and have since taken prominence, they are included in every Access Point (AP) in every home. Introduction of NATs made it virtually impossible to form P2P networks between machines that were behind different NATs - the only way to achieve this is to take help from central control servers using protocols like STUN and TURN [read more about the Control Plane]. Fast forward from the early days of the internet and it's clear that the technological landscape has changed tremendously over the last 25 years. In just the last decade of cell phones (comparing typical phones from 2009 to 2019):
  • There is an over 30x compute performance improvement on client-side processing
  • We officially have cell phones with storage of 1.5TB
  • There is a 700% increase in average UL bandwidth
We believe we are at a point of inflection in technology that can disrupt the existing client-server architecture. While the client-server architecture works very well for Internet browsing, it severely limits use cases that require low latency and high bandwidth communication, e.g cases like Video, AR, VR, etc. Further for cases like IoT, the value of IoT is only derived when you have a network of things interconnected to each other in secure and private ad-hoc networks. For all these use cases, a P2P network architecture is the right technology option rather than using a client-server architecture. The goal of the COCO platform is to simplify decentralized communication and help create a developer community that can solve various cases using P2P network topologies. The mechanism used by COCO to perform NAT traversal and P2P cloudless data transfer is via using a technique known as UDP hole punching. The COCO platform provides developers both options of TCP and UDP semantics over the decentralized IP network.