Towards environmental-adaptive and performance-resilient consensus in distributed ledger technology

Abstract

Many recent research works have proposed distributed ledger technology (DLT) that employs Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols as the underlying core primitive to create a total order among all transactions. Compared to many Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, this design typically benefits from increased performance, energy efficiency and proven liveness and safety characteristics. While BFT protocols have the potential to create highly resilient infrastructures, some questions yet remain to be answered. This paper sketches our current and future research on how DLTs can benefit from making the underlying BFT protocol adaptive towards the system's environment (e.g., geographic decentralization or system scale) and resilient against attacks of malicious replicas that are targeted at degrading the overall system performance.