TSBFT: A scalable and efficient leaderless byzantine consensus for consortium blockchain

Abstract

In this paper, we present a high-performance, scalable Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocol TSBFT for the consortium blockchains that does not rely on expensive leader-driven communication. It overcomes the challenges faced by the existing BFT protocol in three aspects: single-point failure, huge total message sizes, and limited by the slowest nodes. The proposed protocol secretly selects block proposers and uses threshold signature as a multi-round voting mechanism to confirm the validity of the proposed block. We adopt transmission pipelining to improve the network utilization while optimizing the gossip communication scheme to reduce the total message sizes. Finally, our protocol guarantees the security and liveness of the system. Experimental results show that, compared with other related BFT protocols (e.g., PBFT), TSBFT can effectively solve these three challenges. In addition, our experiments also show how the different optimization ingredients of TSBFT contribute to its performance and scalability. The results show that compared with the traditional BFT protocol, it can scale from dozens of nodes to hundreds of nodes.