The quest for scaling BFT Consensus through Tree-Based Vote Aggregation

TL;DR

This paper introduces hesystem, a scalable BFT consensus protocol using tree-based vote aggregation, achieving higher throughput and fault tolerance than previous algorithms, suitable for large permissioned blockchain networks.

Contribution

It presents the first BFT protocol with a tree-based aggregation method that scales efficiently and reconfigures optimally in faulty conditions.

Findings

hesystem scales to large process counts.

Outperforms HotStuff's throughput by up to 38x.

Achieves optimal reconfiguration in faulty runs.

Abstract

With the growing commercial interest in blockchain, permissioned implementations have received increasing attention. Unfortunately, existing BFT consensus protocols that are the backbone of permissioned blockchains, either scale poorly or offer limited throughput. Most of these algorithms require at least one process to receive and validate the votes from all other processes and then broadcast the result, which is inherently non-scalable. Some algorithms avoid this bottleneck by using aggregation trees to collect and validate votes. However, to the best of our knowledge, such algorithms offer limited throughput and degrade quickly in the presence of faults. In this paper we propose \thesystem, the first BFT communication abstraction that organizes participants in a tree to perform scalable vote aggregation and that, in faulty runs, is able to terminate the protocol within an optimal number of reconfigurations ($f+1$). We define precisely which aggregation trees allow for optimal reconfiguration and show that, unlike previous protocols, when using these configurations, \thesystem scales to large number of processes and outperforms HotStuff's throughput by up to 38x.