Coordination-Free Byzantine Replication with Minimal Communication Costs

State-of-the-art fault-tolerant and federated data management systems rely on fully-replicated designs in which all participants have equivalent roles. Consequently, these systems have only limited scalability and are ill-suited for high-performance data management. As an alternative, we propose a hierarchical design in which a Byzantine cluster manages data, while an arbitrary number of learners can reliable learn these updates and use the corresponding data. To realize our design, we propose the delayed-replication algorithm, an efficient solution to the Byzantine learner problem that is central to our design. The delayed-replication algorithm is coordination-free, scalable, and has minimal communication cost for all participants involved. In doing so, the delayed-broadcast algorithm opens the door to new high-performance fault-tolerant and federated data management systems. To illustrate this, we show that the delayed-replication algorithm is not only useful to support specialized learners, but can also be used to reduce the overall communication cost of permissioned blockchains and to improve their storage scalability

BLOCKCHAIN – AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS MODELS

Over the last years, the blockchain technology has attracted the attention of both business users and IT specialists. In essence, blockchain or a chain of blocks is a distributed and decentralized database replicated across the multiple nodes of a network. Until recently blockchain has been associated mainly with cryptocurrencies, but nowadays it is revealing its serious potential as a means of replacing the business models that facilitate the operations of business organisations and the communication between them. The utilisation of the advantages provided by blockchain, however, requires their appropriate interpretations within the framework of business processes. With reference to this, the article analyses some of the main concepts and mechanisms of this technology. Special attention is paid to the interrelation of blockchain and distributed ledger (DLT) technologies, hashing of transactions and data management through consensus as well as the so called “smart contracts”. A parallel is made between the capabilities of public and private blockchain. Based on this, the study defines the fundamental blockchain characteristics and the advantages resulting from them. It is suggested that the blockchain technology offers a solution to the primary problem of trust between people in the context of global communication and ensures better transparency, reliability and security of data and business processes. In addition, the author outlines certain potential technical and business risk that have to be taken into consideration in the process of data transfer with reference to blockchain