TY - GEN
T1 - DBFT: A byzantine fault tolerant protocol with graceful performance degradation
AU - Zhang, Jingjing
AU - Rong, Yingyao
AU - Cao, Jiannong
AU - Rong, Chunming
AU - Bian, Jing
AU - Wu, Weigang
PY - 2019/10
Y1 - 2019/10
N2 - The surging interest in blockchain has revitalized the search for efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols, which are used for blockchains to achieve consensus among replicated data blocks. Most existing BFT protocols perform well in fault-free cases, but they usually suffer from serious performance degradation when faults occur. In this paper, we present DBFT, a BFT protocol that realizes graceful performance degradation in normal cases. The major novelty of DBFT lies in the double-response mechanism, which lets replica nodes deterministically respond to clients twice: one is after the speculative execution phase and the other is after the commitment phase. The double-response mechanism can handle inconsistency in speculative execution, so as to alleviate performance degradation caused by faults. Moreover, DBFT does not involve clients in critical consensus operations so as to reduce the load of clients. The correctness properties, i.e., safety and liveness, of DBFT is rigorously proved. The performance of DBFT is evaluated via experiments and the results show that, DBFT outperforms similar BFT protocols obviously in normal cases.
AB - The surging interest in blockchain has revitalized the search for efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols, which are used for blockchains to achieve consensus among replicated data blocks. Most existing BFT protocols perform well in fault-free cases, but they usually suffer from serious performance degradation when faults occur. In this paper, we present DBFT, a BFT protocol that realizes graceful performance degradation in normal cases. The major novelty of DBFT lies in the double-response mechanism, which lets replica nodes deterministically respond to clients twice: one is after the speculative execution phase and the other is after the commitment phase. The double-response mechanism can handle inconsistency in speculative execution, so as to alleviate performance degradation caused by faults. Moreover, DBFT does not involve clients in critical consensus operations so as to reduce the load of clients. The correctness properties, i.e., safety and liveness, of DBFT is rigorously proved. The performance of DBFT is evaluated via experiments and the results show that, DBFT outperforms similar BFT protocols obviously in normal cases.
KW - Blockchain
KW - Byzantine fault tolerance
KW - Consensus
KW - Distributed computing
KW - Replication
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85084140904&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/SRDS47363.2019.00023
DO - 10.1109/SRDS47363.2019.00023
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85084140904
T3 - Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems
SP - 123
EP - 132
BT - Proceedings - 2019 IEEE 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, SRDS 2019
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 38th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, SRDS 2019
Y2 - 1 October 2019 through 4 October 2019
ER -