BigBFT: A Multileader Byzantine Fault Tolerance Protocol for High Throughput

TL;DR

BigBFT is a novel multi-leader Byzantine fault tolerance protocol that significantly improves throughput and reduces latency in blockchain consensus by enabling parallel proposals, piggybacking votes, pipelining, and minimal communication steps.

Contribution

This paper introduces BigBFT, a scalable multi-leader BFT protocol with innovative techniques for high throughput and low latency, outperforming existing protocols.

Findings

BigBFT achieves up to 190% higher throughput than existing protocols.

BigBFT reduces latency by up to 70% compared to other BFT protocols.

BigBFT has an amortized communication cost of O(n) over n requests.

Abstract

This paper describes BigBFT, a multi-leader Byzantine fault tolerance protocol that achieves high throughput and scalable consensus in blockchain systems. BigBFT achieves this by (1) enabling every node to be a leader that can propose and order the blocks in parallel, (2) piggybacking votes within rounds, (3) pipelining blocks across rounds, and (4) using only two communication steps to order blocks in the common case. BigBFT has an amortized communication cost of $O(n)$ over $n$ requests. We evaluate BigBFT's performance both analytically, using back-of-the-envelope load formulas to construct a cost analysis, and also empirically by implementing it in our PaxiBFT framework. Our evaluation compares BigBFT with PBFT, Tendermint, Streamlet, and Hotstuff under various workloads using deployments of 4 to 20 nodes. Our results show that BigBFT outperforms PBFT, Tendermint, Streamlet, and Hotstuff protocols either in terms of latency (by up to $70\%$) or in terms of throughput (by up to $190\%$).