A Pipeline-based Chain Structure Byzantine Consensus Algorithm for Blockchain Systems
Xinlei Liu, Yang Liu, Xiangyang Li, Haohao Cao, Yaoqi Wang · 2023
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms have been widely applied in blockchain systems due to their fault tolerance capability to reach determined consistency in the presence of malicious nodes. However, the BFT consensus algorithms are confronted with low efficiency and scalability problems caused by multiple rounds of handshake communication. In this paper, we propose a Pipeline-Based Chain Structure Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm (PCS-BFT), which adopts a pipeline framework to process and validate each block in a concurrent organization with randomly selected 2f + 1 nodes. Through synchronizing the hash relationship of the blocks among organizations, a uniform chain structure is achieved in terms of the epoch period. Comparison experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the PCS-BFT algorithm, and the theoretical analysis is given to prove the Byzantine fault-tolerant security. Experimental results show that the throughput of the PCS-BFT algorithm is 20 more than HotStuff, considered the first pipeline-based BFT consensus algorithm, and three times more than PBFT as the nodes scale increases. Furthermore, PCS-BFT has reduced the consensus latency to make it better applied both in public blockchain and consortium blockchain systems.