ESCAPE to Precaution against Leader Failures

TL;DR

ESCAPE is a novel leader election protocol for consensus systems that reduces election time and prevents split votes by prioritizing more up-to-date servers based on log responsiveness, especially under message loss.

Contribution

It introduces ESCAPE, a leader election method that dynamically prioritizes servers to avoid split votes and expedite leader selection in Raft-like protocols.

Findings

ESCAPE significantly reduces leader election time in large clusters.

The protocol performs well under message loss conditions.

Prioritizing up-to-date servers improves election success rate.

Abstract

Leader-based consensus protocols must undergo a view-change phase to elect a new leader when the current leader fails. The new leader is often decided upon a candidate server that collects votes from a quorum of servers. However, voting-based election mechanisms intrinsically cause competition in leadership candidacy when each candidate collects only partial votes. This split-vote scenario can result in no leadership winner and prolong the undesired view-change period. In this paper, we investigate a case study of Raft's leader election mechanism and propose a new leader election protocol, called ESCAPE, that fundamentally solves split votes by prioritizing servers based on their log responsiveness. ESCAPE dynamically assigns servers with a configuration that offers different priorities through Raft's periodic heartbeat. In each assignment, ESCAPE keeps track of server log responsiveness and assigns configurations that are inclined to win an election to more up-to-date servers, thereby preparing a pool of prioritized candidates. Consequently, when the next election takes place, the candidate with the highest priority will defeat its counterparts and becomes the next leader without competition. The evaluation results show that ESCAPE progressively reduces the leader election time when the cluster scales up, and the improvement becomes more significant under message loss.