Interactive Architecture Viewer
An explorable model of the IFM system — the conceptual counterpart to the live topology in the ifm-dashboard (observability) app. The diagram follows the system's two governing principles:
Direct P2P is the default. Relays are used only when the P2P mesh cannot maintain the desired service quality.
How to explore
- Zoom into the architecture: click a component to expand its internals (Station → audio pipeline, P2P Mesh → paths, Relay → pool, …). Click again to collapse.
- Click any node (leaf or group) to open its detail panel with key facts and links to the relevant spec sections and Rust sources.
- Pan / zoom with the wheel and drag, or use the controls in the bottom right.
What the graph shows
| Node | Role |
|---|---|
| Station | Broadcast origin: capture → mixer (optional) → DSP → Opus → frames |
| Control Plane | Discovery, topology, presence — signed records, never the media path |
| Media Plane | EncodedAudioFrame packetization, adaptive jitter buffer, PLC |
| P2P Mesh | Primary distribution: direct QUIC paths, voluntary forwarders, path manager |
| Relay | Fallback / overflow infrastructure: shared pool, scored selection, activation only when the mesh degrades |
| Listeners | Endpoints that tune; any listener can become a forwarding peer |
Edges are meaningful: solid edges carry the primary audio path, dashed edges are the fallback relay path, and labeled edges show what crosses each boundary (audio, frames, topology).
Live mode
The same topology, rendered from live telemetry (not a static model), is the job of the ifm-dashboard desktop app: it joins the mesh through the rendezvous as a passive observer node and reads the mesh telemetry plane — coloring nodes by health, peers, jitter, relay pool state and path quality — without ever tuning, broadcasting, or touching the data path.