Hamster: A Fast Synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance Protocol

TL;DR

Hamster is a new synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol that improves performance and reduces synchrony dependence using coding techniques, achieving higher throughput and lower latency in various network conditions.

Contribution

Introduces Hamster, a Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol with coding-based communication efficiency and enhanced performance in both synchronous and mobile environments.

Findings

Hamster's throughput is 2.5x that of Sync HotStuff in 9-node networks.

Throughput gain increases to 10x as network scales to 65 nodes.

Hamster outperforms Sync HotStuff in throughput and latency with adjustable block size.

Abstract

This paper introduces Hamster, a novel synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol that achieves better performance and has weaker dependency on synchrony. Specifically, Hamster employs coding techniques to significantly decrease communication complexity and addresses coding related security issues. Consequently, Hamster achieves a throughput gain that increases linearly with the number of nodes, compared to Sync HotStuff. By adjusting the block size, Hamster outperforms Sync HotStuff in terms of both throughput and latency. Moreover, With minor modifications, Hamster can also function effectively in mobile sluggish environments, further reducing its dependency on strict synchrony. We implement Hamster and the experimental results demonstrate its performance advantages. Specifically, Hamster's throughput in a network of $9$ nodes is $2.5\times$ that of Sync HotStuff, and this gain increases to $10$ as the network scales to $65$ nodes.