noderecord

A noderecord is a data construct used in distributed systems to describe a single participant node within a network. It encapsulates the node's identity, location, and capabilities and is used for discovery, routing, and management tasks. Noderecords may be stored in a central registry or propagated via a distributed ledger or gossip protocol, and they can be serialized as JSON, Protobuf, or other formats for transmission.

Typically a noderecord contains fields such as nodeId (a unique identifier), host or address, port, publicKey or certificate, role (for example client, worker, validator), status (online, offline, degraded), lastSeen timestamp, and capacity metrics (e.g., CPU, memory, storage). Optional metadata may include software version, supported features, and regional information. Records may be signed to verify authenticity and prevent tampering.

In practice noderecords underpin neighbor discovery in peer-to-peer networks, ledger networks, and distributed databases. They support routing tables, authenticated joining, load balancing, and failover decisions by providing a current view of available nodes and their capabilities. Some systems use versioned noderecords with TTLs to ensure stale entries are cleaned up.

Common challenges include ensuring freshness and consistency across nodes, preventing impersonation, and scaling to large networks. Techniques include cryptographic signatures, distributed registries with rollback protection, time-to-live fields, and compact encoding to reduce bandwidth usage.

See also: Node, Node registry, Peer discovery, Node descriptor.