Network-Assisted Raft Consensus Algorithm
Yang Zhang, Bo Han, Zhi-Li Zhang, Vijay Gopalakrishnan · 2017
Consensus is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. In this poster, we ask the following question: can we partially offload the execution of a consensus algorithm to the network to improve its performance? We argue for an affirmative answer by proposing a network-assisted implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm. Our approach reduces consensus latency, is failure-aware, and does not sacrifice correctness or scalability. In order to enable Raft-aware forwarding and quick response, we use P4-based programmable switches and offload partial Raft functionality to the switch. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach and performance improvements it offers via a prototype implementation.