Towards Efficient and Robust BFT Protocols with ER-BFT (Short Paper)

Abstract

Significant efforts have been made in designing Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) state machine replication. In addition to facing arbitrary types of faults, efficient BFT protocols aim at improving the performance in the absence of faults. This is usually obtained at the expense of higher cost when faults occur. Symmetrically, BFT protocols known as robust protocols tend to improve the performance when some types of faults occur. However, this usually implies a higher overhead in fault-free executions. ER-BFT associates efficiency and robustness to BFT protocols. The paper presents the design principles of ER-BFT, and its implementation through the ER-PBFT protocol. When compared to classical robust BFT protocols, ER-PBFT achieves better performance in fault-free cases, and in presence of faults.