Fully Decentralised Consensus for Extreme-scale Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper introduces BECP, a fully decentralised epidemic-based consensus protocol for large-scale blockchains, demonstrating superior throughput, scalability, and latency compared to traditional and recent protocols through experimental analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents BECP, a novel epidemic protocol for blockchain consensus that improves scalability and efficiency without relying on fixed validators or leaders.

Findings

BECP achieves 1.196x higher throughput than traditional protocols.

BECP reduces consensus latency by 4.775x compared to benchmarks.

BECP significantly decreases message complexity relative to Avalanche.

Abstract

Blockchain is a decentralised, immutable ledger technology that has been widely adopted in many sectors for various applications such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and supply chain management. Distributed consensus is a fundamental component of blockchain, which is required to ensure trust, security, and integrity of the data stored and the transactions processed in the blockchain. Various consensus algorithms have been developed, each affected from certain issues such as node failures, high resource consumption, collusion, etc. This work introduces a fully decentralised consensus protocol, Blockchain Epidemic Consensus Protocol (BECP), suitable for very large and extreme-scale blockchain systems. The proposed approach leverages the benefits of epidemic protocols, such as no reliance on a fixed set of validators or leaders, probabilistic guarantees of convergence, efficient use of network resources, and tolerance to node and network failures. A comparative experimental analysis has been carried out with traditional protocols including PAXOS, RAFT, and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), as well as a relatively more recent protocol such as Avalanche, which is specifically designed for very large-scale systems. The results illustrate how BECP outperforms them in terms of throughput, scalability and consensus latency. BECP achieves an average of 1.196 times higher throughput in terms of consensus on items and 4.775 times better average consensus latency. Furthermore, BECP significantly reduces the number of messages compared to Avalanche. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of fully decentralised consensus for blockchain technology based on epidemic protocols.