Does hyperledger fabric use structured p2p?

Question

P2P has two different structures. one is unstructured P2P and the other one is structured P2P.

I know fabric use hybrid-P2P. And is it use strutured P2P?

Answer 1

Hyperledger Fabric really uses "structured" peer to peer communication. Peers communicate with ordering service nodes and with other peer nodes. Channels form the basis of the peer to peer communication (meaning that communication is scoped on a per channel basis).

For peer to orderer communication, this is structured based on channel definitions .... when a peer joins a channel, the channel definition is contained in the block passed via the JoinChannel API. This is a special type of block known as a config block and it contains the information about the ordering service endpoints, membership for the channel and optionally the endpoints of peers from other organizations (anchor peers).

Peers which belong to the same organization can also "gossip" and this is configured by setting a bootstrap peer when a peer starts up. From this, the peers within an org will "discover" each other.

If an organization chooses to expose public endpoints from multiple peers, peers from other organizations will discover these peers by connecting the to anchor peer for the other org for a given a channel.