Arbitration Mechanisms for Multiple Entry Capability in PBFT for IoT Systems
Vojislav B. Mišić, Jelena Mišić, Xiaolin Chang · 2022
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) is a widely used consensus protocol which is sensitive to malicious behavior of the designated leader. In this paper we discuss two mechanisms that allow any ordering node on the consensus committee to act as the leader, thus alleviating the dependency on the leader. The selection of the next leader is performed by arbitration, rather than through a predefined sequence or round-robin mechanism. As the result, the proposed mechanisms lead to improved security since a malicious leader cannot stall the consensus and the next leader is not known beforehand. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed mechanisms indeed offer independence of the chosen leader and a reduction of queuing times of client proposals, albeit with some performance degradation.