An experimental framework for improving the performance of BFT consensus for future permissioned blockchains

Permissioned Blockchains are increasingly considered in enterprise use-cases, many of which do not require geo-distribution, or even disallow it due to legislation. Examples include countrywide networks, such as Alastria, or those deployed using cloud-based platforms such as IBM Blockchain Platform. We expect these blockchains to eventually run in environments with high bandwidth and low latency modern networks, as well as with advanced programmable hardware accelerators.

Even though there is renewed interest in BFT consensus algorithms with various proposals targeting Permissioned Blockchains, related work does not optimize for fast networks and does not incorporate hardware accelerators - we make the case that doing so will pay off in the long run. To this end, we re-implemented the seminal PBFT algorithm in a way that allows us to measure different configurations of the protocol. Through this we explore the benefits of various common optimization strategies and show that the protocol is unlikely to saturate more than 10Gbps networks without relying on specialized hardware-based offloading.

Based on the experimental results, we discuss two concrete ways in which the cost of consensus in Permissioned Blockchains could be reduced in high-speed networking environments, namely, offloading to SmartNICs and implementing the protocol on standalone FPGAs.