Optimizing Streamlined Blockchain Consensus with Generalized Weighted Voting and Enhanced Leader Rotation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel continuous weighted voting scheme for HotStuff, significantly reducing latency in Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols by optimizing leader rotation and weight distribution, and demonstrates its effectiveness in fault scenarios.

Contribution

It presents the first continuous weighting scheme for HotStuff, combining weighted voting with leader rotation optimizations to improve consensus efficiency in Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols.

Findings

Weighted voting reduces latency in BFT protocols.

Continuous weighting scheme outperforms discrete approaches.

Enhanced leader rotation improves fault tolerance.

Abstract

Streamlined Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols, such as HotStuff [PODC'19], and weighted voting represent two possible strategies to improve consensus in the distributed systems world. Several studies have been conducted on both techniques, but the research on combining the two is scarce. To cover this knowledge gap, we introduce a weighted voting approach on Hotstuff, along with two optimisations targeting weight assignment distribution and leader rotation in the underlying state replication protocol. Moreover, the weighted protocols developed rely on studies proving the effectiveness of a specific voting power assignment based on discrete values. We generalise this approach by presenting a novel continuous weighting scheme applied to the Hotstuff protocol to highlight the effectiveness of this technique in faulty scenarios. We prove the significant latency reduction impact of weighted voting on streamlined protocols and advocate for further research.