From DBWiki
Starfish Direct Connection messaging is used primarily for data transfer and direct interaction with a storage peer.
Starfish Network Announcement messaging and Starfish Storage messaging are used for efficient, low-bandwidth announcements to a subset of the storage network.
Starfish storage networks use two forms of communication when transmitting messages to use the underlying communication network most efficiently.
Starfish Direct Connection messaging is used for point-to-point data transfer and reliable messaging. This is also known as unicast messaging and is traditionally how data gets around the Internet. When you use a web browser to open a web page, you are creating a unicast connection to the web server. These connections take quite a while to set up and are not ideal when you want to talk to 1,000 computers at a time.
When a single peer needs to talk to hundreds or thousands of machines at a time in a very efficient manner, the Starfish Network Announcement protocol or the Starfish Storage protocol are used. This is known as multicast messaging and is used whenever a certain peer needs to announce something to other peers on the network.
Starfish is designed to use the best communication method possible when running operations on the storage network. The system only communicates when it needs to and utilizes the fastest, most bandwidth efficient messaging channels when performing all of its operations.
