Please note: This master’s thesis presentation will be given online.
Qingnan
Duan, Master’s
candidate
David
R.
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocols are a crucial component in blockchain systems. Traditional BFT consensus protocols have poor scalability, and their performance is sensitive to the latency between their participants, which leads to low performance in a geo-distributed deployment. RCanopus is a consensus protocol that aims to provide high throughput and good scalability in a geo-distributed environment. It organizes participants into a hierarchical structure that is topology-aware. We implemented an ordering service for HyperLedger Fabric with RCanopus, and evaluated its performance on AWS. Comparing to running SBFT across all datacenters, RCanopus is able to achieve a 10.7x increase in peak throughput in a deployment across 4 AWS regions. During our evaluation, we also identified several design challenges and proposed a few protocol extensions to further improve RCanopus. We implemented a prototype in order to evaluate the extensions that are not included in our ordering service. Our evaluation results show that the new extensions can improve the peak throughput by 12.7% to 114.3%, depending on the available bandwidth on wide area links.
To participate in this presentation virtually, please join the meeting on Microsoft Teams.