Bidl: A High-throughput, Low-latency Permissioned Blockchain Framework for Datacenter Networks

Ji Qi, Xusheng Chen, Yunpeng Jiang, Jianyu Jiang, Tianxiang Shen, Shixiong Zhao, Sen Wang, Gong Zhang, Li Chen, Man Ho Au, Heming Cui

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

35 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A permissioned blockchain framework typically runs an efficient Byzantine consensus protocol and is attractive to deploy fast trading applications among a large number of mutually untrusted participants (e.g., companies). Unfortunately, all existing permissioned blockchain frameworks adopt sequential workflows for invoking the consensus protocol and executing applications' transactions, making the performance of these applications much lower than deploying them in traditional systems (e.g., in-datacenter stock exchange). We propose Bidl, the first permissioned blockchain framework highly optimized for datacenter networks. We leverage the network ordering in such networks to create a shepherded parallel workflow, which carries a sequencer to parallelize the consensus protocol and transaction execution speculatively. However, the presence of malicious participants (e.g., a malicious sequencer) can easily perturb the parallel workflow to greatly degrade Bidl's performance. To achieve stable high performance, Bidl efficiently shepherds all participants by detecting their misbehaviors, and performs denylist-based view changes to replace or deny malicious participants. Compared with three fast permissioned blockchain frameworks, Bidl's parallel workflow reduces applications' latency by up to 72.7% and improves their throughput by up to 4.3x in the presence of malicious participants. Bidl is suitable to be integrated with traditional stock exchange systems. Bidl's code is released on github.com/hku-systems/bidl.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSOSP 2021 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages18-34
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781450387095
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Oct 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP 2021 - Virtual, Online, Germany
Duration: 26 Oct 202129 Oct 2021

Publication series

NameSOSP 2021 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

Conference

Conference28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP 2021
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityVirtual, Online
Period26/10/2129/10/21

Keywords

  • byzantine fault tolerance
  • high-performance blockchain workflows
  • permissioned blockchains

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

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