Blockchain Epidemic Consensus for Large-Scale Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces BECP, a scalable, fully decentralized epidemic consensus protocol for large-scale blockchain networks that improves throughput, latency, and message efficiency over existing protocols.

Contribution

The paper presents BECP, a novel epidemic-based consensus protocol that enhances scalability and efficiency without fixed roles, validated through extensive experiments.

Findings

BECP achieves higher throughput than classic protocols.

BECP reduces consensus latency significantly.

BECP demonstrates superior message-passing efficiency.

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has applications in many domains such as cryptocurrency, smart contracts, supply chain management, and many others. Distributed consensus is a fundamental component of blockchain systems that enables secure, precise, and tamper-proof verification of data without relying on central authorities. Existing consensus protocols, nevertheless, suffer from drawbacks, some of which are related to scalability, resource consumption, and fault tolerance. We introduce Blockchain Epidemic Consensus Protocol (BECP), a novel fully decentralised consensus protocol for blockchain networks at a large scale. BECP follows epidemic communication principles, without fixed roles like validators or leaders, and achieves probabilistic convergence, efficient message dissemination, and tolerance to message delays. We provide an extensive experimental comparison of BECP against classic protocols like PAXOS, RAFT, and PBFT, and newer epidemic-based protocols like Avalanche and Snowman. The findings indicate that BECP provides desirable gains in throughput, consensus latency, and substantial message-passing efficiency compared to existing epidemic-based approaches, validating its usability as an effective and scalable approach for next-generation blockchain systems.