Proteus: A scalable BFT consensus protocol for blockchains

Mohammad M. Jalalzai, Costas Busch, Golden G. Richard

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus exhibits higher throughput in comparison to Proof of Work (PoW) in blockchains. However, BFT-based protocols suffer from scalability problems with respect to the number of replicas in the network due to their inherent quadratic message complexity. Previously, proposed solutions improve BFT performance for normal operation, but will fall back to quadratic message complexity once the protocol observes a certain number of failures. To address this issue we propose Proteus, a new BFT-based consensus protocol which elects a subset of nodes c as a root committee. Proteus guarantees stable performance, regardless of the number of failures in the network and it improves on the quadratic message complexity of typical BFT-based protocols to O(cn) messages, where c << n, for large number of nodes n. We tested our protocol on 200 Amazon EC2 instances, with two different baseline BFT protocols (PBFT and Bchain) for comparison. In these tests, our protocol outperformed the baselines by more than 2× in terms of throughput as well as latency.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 2nd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Blockchain 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages308-313
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781728146935
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Blockchain 2019 - Atlanta, United States
Duration: Jul 14 2019Jul 17 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2019 2nd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Blockchain 2019

Conference

Conference2nd IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Blockchain 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period7/14/197/17/19

Keywords

  • BFT
  • Blockchain
  • Byzantine
  • Consensus
  • Scalability

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Information Systems and Management

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