Availability

One of the key roles of validators is to ensure availability of all data necessary to validate candidates for the duration of a challenge period. This is done via an erasure-coding of the data to keep available.

Signed Availability Bitfield

A bitfield signed by a particular validator about the availability of pending candidates.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
type SignedAvailabilityBitfield = Signed<Bitvec>;

struct Bitfields(Vec<(SignedAvailabilityBitfield)>), // bitfields sorted by validator index, ascending
}

Semantics

A SignedAvailabilityBitfield represents the view from a particular validator's perspective. Each bit in the bitfield corresponds to a single availability core. A 1 bit indicates that the validator believes the following statements to be true for a core:

• the availability core is occupied
• there exists a CommittedCandidateReceipt corresponding to that core. In other words, that para has a block in progress.
• the validator's Availability Store contains a chunk of that parablock's PoV.

In other words, it is the transpose of OccupiedCore::availability.

Proof-of-Validity

Often referred to as PoV, this is a type-safe wrapper around bytes (Vec<u8>) when referring to data that acts as a stateless-client proof of validity of a candidate, when used as input to the validation function of the para.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
struct PoV(Vec<u8>);
}

Available Data

This is the data we want to keep available for each candidate included in the relay chain. This is the PoV of the block, as well as the PersistedValidationData

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
struct AvailableData {
    /// The Proof-of-Validation of the candidate.
    pov: Arc<PoV>,
    /// The persisted validation data used to check the candidate.
    validation_data: PersistedValidationData,
}
}

TODO: With XCMP, we also need to keep available the outgoing messages as a result of para-validation.

Erasure Chunk

The AvailableData is split up into an erasure-coding as part of the availability process. Each validator gets a chunk. This describes one of those chunks, along with its proof against a merkle root hash, which should be apparent from context, and is the erasure_root field of a CandidateDescriptor.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
struct ErasureChunk {
    /// The erasure-encoded chunk of data belonging to the candidate block.
    chunk: Vec<u8>,
    /// The index of this erasure-encoded chunk of data.
    index: u32,
    /// Proof for this chunk's branch in the Merkle tree.
    proof: Vec<Vec<u8>>,
}
}