Experimental performance comparison of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant protocols for data centers

Abstract—In this paper, we implement and evaluate three different Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) state machine replication protocols for data centers: (1) BASIC: The classic solution from Pease, Shostak, and Lamport [1]; (2) Digest: A simplified version of the seminal practical BFT protocol PBFT by Castro and Liskov [2]; and (3) NCBA: a network coding based BFT protocol that we propose in this paper. Unlike existing practical BFT protocols such as PBFT, which utilize collision-resistant hash functions to reduce traffic load for BFT, NCBA uses a computationally efficient error-detection network coding scheme. Since NCBA does not rely on any hash function, it is always correct rather than correct only with high probability as PBFT. Moreover, even though NCBA introduces 50% more communication cost than PBFT does, it is compensated by reducing the computational cost of hashing. Through extensive experiments, we verified that NCBA performs at least as well as Digest, without relying o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Guanfeng Liang, Benjamin Sommer, Nitin H. Vaidya
• Keywords: Classic Solution, Communications, Hash Function, Hash Functions, INFOCOM 2012