AlphaBlock: An Evaluation Framework for Blockchain Consensus Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces AlphaBlock, a comprehensive evaluation framework for comparing blockchain consensus protocols, specifically BFT and Nakamoto Consensus, focusing on performance metrics like throughput and latency.

Contribution

AlphaBlock provides a systematic way to evaluate and compare the performance of different blockchain consensus protocols using practical configurations.

Findings

HBFT outperforms PoA in most scenarios due to no forks.

Optimal configurations identified can enhance consensus algorithm performance.

Framework facilitates performance benchmarking of consensus protocols.

Abstract

Consensus protocols play a pivotal role to balance security and efficiency in blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for blockchain consensus protocols termed as AlphaBlock. In this framework, we compare the overall performance of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus and Nakamoto Consensus (NC). BFT consensus is reached by multiple rounds of quorum votes from the supermajority, while NC is reached by accumulating credibility with the implicit voting from appending blocks. AlphaBlock incorporates the key concepts of Hotstu BFT (HBFT) and Proof-of-authority (PoA) as the case study of BFT and NC. Using this framework, we compare the throughput and latency of HBFT and PoA with practical network and blockchain configurations. Our results show that the performance of HBFT dominates PoA in most scenarios due to the absence of forks in HBFT. Moreover, we find out a set of optimal configurations in AlphaBlock, which sheds a light for improving the performance of blockchain consensus algorithms.