Generalized Consensus for Practical Fault Tolerance

Abstract

Despite extensive research on Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems, overheads associated with such solutions preclude widespread adoption. Past efforts such as the Cross Fault Tolerance (XFT) model address this problem by making a weaker assumption that a majority of nodes are correct and communicate synchronously. Although XPaxos of Liu et al. (applying the XFT model) achieves similar performance as Paxos, it does not scale with the number of faults. Also, its reliance on a single leader introduces considerable downtime in case of failures. We present Elpis, the first multi-leader XFT consensus protocol. By adopting the Generalized Consensus specification, we were able to devise a multi-leader protocol that exploits the commutativity property inherent in the commands ordered by the system. Elpis maps accessed objects to non-faulty replicas during periods of synchrony. Subsequently, these replicas order all commands which access these objects. The experimental evaluation confirms the effectiveness of this approach: Elpis achieves up to 2x speedup over XPaxos and up to 3.5x speedup over state-of-the-art Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus Protocols.