The Pipes Model for Latency and Throughput Analysis
Andrew Lewis-Pye, Kartik Nayak, Nibesh Shrestha · 2026
Traditionally, latency in distributed computing protocols is expressed as the number of communication rounds or network delays; it does not take into account the amount of data sent or the dependencies among parties sending the data. Moreover, throughput for a protocol is typically only empirically computed. Due to this, the only means of obtaining or comparing the practical latency and throughput of protocols is through expensive implementation and experimentation. In this paper, we present Pipes, a model for analyzing latency and throughput in state machine replication (SMR) protocols. The Pipes model captures the effect of processor bandwidth S, transaction arrival rate D, and the network delay Δ, enabling us to explicitly specify the throughput bottleneck and the latency of a protocol. Using Pipes, we perform an analysis of broadcast primitives such as Besteffort Broadcast and Reliable Broadcast, as well as state-of-the-art SMR protocols such as DispersedSimplex, Tendermint, HotStuff, and Sailfish. We experimentally validate these results by implementing the Best-effort Broadcast primitives and SMR protocols (DispersedSimplex and Sailfish). Our comparisons show clear trade-offs: single-sender protocols that exploit pipelining and erasure coding (e.g., DispersedSimplex) can achieve substantially lower latency across many regimes but have a lower latency bottleneck by a constant factor; many DAG-based protocols push the bottleneck higher at the cost of higher per-block latency scaling. HotStuff's leader-relay design, while communication-efficient, yields higher latency than Tendermint in our model due to leader bandwidth bottlenecks.