A Raft Variant for Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

Many permissioned blockchain systems adopt Raft as one of the consensus protocol options, however, comparing with traditional distributed systems, blockchain system has more nodes which makes Raft faces challenges when applied to blockchain. In this study, we present a scalable Raft variant called SRaft for permissioned blockchain. SRaft decouples consensus into Replicating phase and Ordering phase, in Replicating Phase, SRaft adopts leaderless block replicating method and supports workload adaptive replicating pattern, so as to make full use of the bandwidth of all peers and greatly reduce the impact of unbalanced workload distribution. In Ordering phase, SRaft uses the features of the chain structure of blockchain to simplify the Ordering phase into a Sending-Receiving communication framework. In our demonstration, we use real-time dashboards containing visualization based on the process of SRaft and provide an interactive platform to give the attendees an in-depth understanding of what SRaft does.