Proactive and Reactive View Change for Fault Tolerant Byzantine Agreement

Abstract

Problem statement: Dealing with arbitrary failures effectively, while reaching agreement, remains a major operational challenge in distributed transactions. In the contemporary literature, standard protocols such as Byzantine Fault Tolerant Distributed Commit and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance handles the problem to a greater extent. However, the limitation with these protocols is that they incur increased message overhead as well as large latency. Approach: To improve the failure resiliency with minimum execution overhead, we propose two new protocols based on proactive view change and reactive view change. Also, both approaches have been analyzed and compared. Results: Our dynamic analysis reflects that, in a faulty scenario, the proactive approach is computationally more efficient with reduced latency as compared to reactive one. Conclusion/Recommendations: Moreover, unlike PBFT and BFTDC, our agreement protocol runs in two phases, which leads to reduced message overhead and total execution time.