DBFT: A byzantine fault tolerant protocol with graceful performance degradation

Jingjing Zhang, Yingyao Rong, Jiannong Cao, Chunming Rong, Jing Bian, Weigang Wu

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

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, SRDS 2019
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages123-132
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)0769567118, 9781728142227
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019
Event38th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, SRDS 2019 - Lyon, France
Duration: 1 Oct 20194 Oct 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems
ISSN (Print)1060-9857

Conference

Conference38th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, SRDS 2019
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityLyon
Period1/10/194/10/19

Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Byzantine fault tolerance
  • Consensus
  • Distributed computing
  • Replication

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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