Fast Stochastic Peer Selection in Proof-of-Stake Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast stochastic peer selection method for Proof-of-Stake protocols, leveraging roulette-wheel selection and stochastic acceptance to achieve constant time complexity, improving efficiency over traditional search-based methods.

Contribution

It adapts roulette-wheel selection with stochastic acceptance to PoS peer selection, enabling O(1) complexity and faster peer sampling.

Findings

Achieves constant time peer selection in PoS protocols.

Reduces computational complexity from O(N) or O(logN) to O(1).

Provides a scalable solution for large peer networks.

Abstract

The problem of peer selection, which randomly selects a peer from a set, is commonplace in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols. In PoS, peers are chosen randomly with probability proportional to the amount of stake that they possess. This paper presents an approach that relates PoS peer selection to Roulette-wheel selection, which is frequently used in genetic and evolutionary algorithms or complex network modelling. In particular, we introduce the use of stochastic acceptance algorithm [6] for fast peer selection. The roulette-wheel selection algorithm [6] achieves O(1) complexity based on stochastic acceptance, whereas searching based algorithms may take O(N ) or O(logN ) complexity in a network of N peers.