Window Based BFT Blockchain Consensus

Mohammad M. Jalalzai, Costas Busch

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

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

There is surge of interest to the blockchain technology not only in the scientific community but in the business community as well. Proof of Work (PoW) and Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) are the two main classes of consensus protocols that are used in the blockchain consensus layer. PoW is highly scalable but very slow with about 7 (transactions/second) performance. BFT based protocols are highly efficient but their scalability are limited to only tens of nodes. One of the main reasons for the BFT limitation is the quadratic O(n^{2}) communication complexity of BFT based protocols for n nodes that requires n \times n broadcasting. In this paper, we present the Musch protocol which is BFT based and provides communication complexity O(fn+n) for f failures and n nodes, where f < n/3, without compromising the latency. Hence, the performance adjusts to f such that for constant f the communication complexity is linear. Musch achieves this by introducing the notion of exponentially increasing windows of nodes to which complains are reported, instead of broadcasting to all the nodes. To our knowledge, this is the first BFT-based blockchain protocol which efficiently addresses simultaneously the issues of communication complexity and latency under the presence of failures.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - IEEE 2018 International Congress on Cybermatics
Subtitle of host publication2018 IEEE Conferences on Internet of Things, Green Computing and Communications, Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, Smart Data, Blockchain, Computer and Information Technology, iThings/GreenCom/CPSCom/SmartData/Blockchain/CIT 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages971-979
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781538679753
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event11th IEEE International Congress on Conferences on Internet of Things, 14th IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications, 11th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, 4th IEEE International Conference on Smart Data, 1st IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and 18th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, iThings/GreenCom/CPSCom/SmartData/Blockchain/CIT 2018 - Halifax, Canada
Duration: Jul 30 2018Aug 3 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE 2018 International Congress on Cybermatics: 2018 IEEE Conferences on Internet of Things, Green Computing and Communications, Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, Smart Data, Blockchain, Computer and Information Technology, iThings/GreenCom/CPSCom/SmartData/Blockchain/CIT 2018

Conference

Conference11th IEEE International Congress on Conferences on Internet of Things, 14th IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications, 11th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, 4th IEEE International Conference on Smart Data, 1st IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and 18th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, iThings/GreenCom/CPSCom/SmartData/Blockchain/CIT 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityHalifax
Period7/30/188/3/18

Keywords

  • BFT
  • blockchain
  • complexity
  • consensus
  • distributed algorithms
  • distributed systems

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous)
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Health Informatics
  • Communication

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