PrestigeBFT: Revolutionizing View Changes in BFT Consensus Algorithms with Reputation Mechanisms

TL;DR

PrestigeBFT introduces a reputation-based active view-change protocol for BFT consensus, significantly improving throughput and fault tolerance by selecting leaders based on historic behavior and reputation.

Contribution

It presents a novel reputation mechanism for active view changes in BFT, enhancing leader selection and resilience over passive protocols.

Findings

Achieves 5X higher throughput than passive protocols.

Maintains performance under benign faults with minimal throughput drop.

Experiences only a 24% throughput reduction under Byzantine faults.

Abstract

This paper proposes PrestigeBFT, a novel leader-based BFT consensus algorithm that addresses the weaknesses of passive view-change protocols. Passive protocols blindly rotate leadership among servers on a predefined schedule, potentially selecting unavailable or slow servers as leaders. PrestigeBFT proposes an active view-change protocol using reputation mechanisms that calculate a server's potential correctness based on historic behavior. The active protocol enables servers to campaign for leadership by performing reputation-associated work. As such, up-to-date and correct servers with good reputations are more likely to be elected as leaders as they perform less work, whereas faulty servers with bad reputations are suppressed from becoming leaders by being required to perform more work. Under normal operation, PrestigeBFT achieves 5X higher throughput than the baseline that uses passive view-change protocols. In addition, PrestigeBFT remains unaffected under benign faults and experiences only a 24% drop in throughput under a variety of Byzantine faults, while the baseline throughput drops by 62% and 69%, respectively.