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An experimental framework for improving the performance of BFT consensus for future permissioned blockchains

Authors:

Zsolt IstvánAuthors Info & Claims

DEBS '21: Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems

Pages 55 - 65

https://doi.org/10.1145/3465480.3466922

Published: 28 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Permissioned Blockchains are increasingly considered in enterprise use-cases, many of which do not require geo-distribution, or even disallow it due to legislation. Examples include countrywide networks, such as Alastria, or those deployed using cloud-based platforms such as IBM Blockchain Platform. We expect these blockchains to eventually run in environments with high bandwidth and low latency modern networks, as well as with advanced programmable hardware accelerators.

Even though there is renewed interest in BFT consensus algorithms with various proposals targeting Permissioned Blockchains, related work does not optimize for fast networks and does not incorporate hardware accelerators - we make the case that doing so will pay off in the long run. To this end, we re-implemented the seminal PBFT algorithm in a way that allows us to measure different configurations of the protocol. Through this we explore the benefits of various common optimization strategies and show that the protocol is unlikely to saturate more than 10Gbps networks without relying on specialized hardware-based offloading.

Based on the experimental results, we discuss two concrete ways in which the cost of consensus in Permissioned Blockchains could be reduced in high-speed networking environments, namely, offloading to SmartNICs and implementing the protocol on standalone FPGAs.

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An experimental framework for improving the performance of BFT consensus for future permissioned blockchains

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DEBS '21: Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems

June 2021

207 pages

ISBN:9781450385558

DOI:10.1145/3465480

General Chairs:
Alessandro Margara
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
,
Emanuele Della Valle
Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 28 June 2021

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Spanish Research Council
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DEBS '21

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DEBS '21: The 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems

June 28 - July 2, 2021

Virtual Event, Italy

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DEBS '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 26 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 145 of 583 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

Najafi MQadah TSadoghi MJacobsen H(2024)DIBA: A Re-Configurable Stream ProcessorIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2024.338119236:9(4550-4566)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TKDE.2024.3381192
Kang DRahnama SHellings JSadoghi M(2024)SpotLess: Concurrent Rotational Consensus Made Practical Through Rapid View Synchronization2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00157(1916-1929)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00157
Barger AGorgadze VBelenov AFrolovicheva E(2023)Atomyze - The Scalable Hyperledger Fabric-Powered Blockchain Platform Revolutionizing Asset-Backed Tokenization2023 IEEE International Conference on Omni-layer Intelligent Systems (COINS)10.1109/COINS57856.2023.10189252(1-8)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/COINS57856.2023.10189252
Amiri MLoo BAgrawal DAbbadi A(2022)QanaatProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3551793.355183515:11(2839-2852)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3551793.3551835
Kuhring LIstvan ZSorniotti AVukolic M(2021)StreamChain: Building a Low-Latency Permissioned Blockchain For Enterprise Use-Cases2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)10.1109/Blockchain53845.2021.00027(130-139)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain53845.2021.00027

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