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arXiv · 2303.11045

SoK: Scalability Techniques for BFT Consensus

Christian Berger·Signe Schwarz-Rüsch·Arne Vogel·Kai Bleeke·Leander Jehl·Hans P. Reiser·Rüdiger Kapitza
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Abstract

With the advancement of blockchain systems, many recent research works have proposed distributed ledger technology~(DLT) that employs Byzantine fault-tolerant~(BFT) consensus protocols to decide which block to append next to the ledger. Notably, BFT consensus can offer high performance, energy efficiency, and provable correctness properties, and it is thus considered a promising building block for creating highly resilient and performant blockchain infrastructures. Yet, a major ongoing challenge is to make BFT consensus applicable to large-scale environments. A large body of recent work addresses this challenge by developing novel ideas to improve the scalability of BFT consensus, thus opening the path for a new generation of BFT protocols tailored to the needs of blockchain. In this survey, we create a systematization of knowledge about the novel scalability-enhancing techniques that state-of-the-art BFT consensus protocols use. For our comparison, we closely analyze the efforts, assumptions, and trade-offs these protocols make.

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Christian Berger, Signe Schwarz-Rüsch, Arne Vogel, Kai Bleeke, Leander Jehl, Hans P. Reiser, Rüdiger Kapitza. 2023-03-20. SoK: Scalability Techniques for BFT Consensus. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11045

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