Research Prototype 1

Research Prototype 1 represents an effort to solve the food delivery problem using a monolithic architecture. It combines a networking stack, protocol-layer concepts, and application-layer concepts into one unwieldy package.

Restaurant operators are accustomed to order management applications which run on mobile devices. We observed that this usability requirement presents a performance bottleneck for our system design. Thus, the purpose of this work -- conducted between April 2020 and November 2021 -- was to evaluate the feasibility of our protocol concepts when operationalized in a software client on resource constrained mobile devices. Could we write a portable JavaScript library to power a React Native order management app on a really cheap Android tablet?

Accordingly, the feature set reflects a horizontal slice of protocol activity, intended to establish a baseline for computational cost. We've tried to solve 100% of the problem, but only 20% of the way. For example: The overlay network and distributed database are implemented, but there is no consensus mechanism defined -- and peers implement a hybrid cryptosystem to encrypt messages, but with a very insecure one-way handshake.