2 research outputs found
Towards Low-Latency Byzantine Agreement Protocols Using RDMA
Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols can mitigate
attacks and errors and are increasingly investigated as consensus
protocols in blockchains. However, they are traditionally
considered costly in terms of message complexity and latency due
to the required multiple rounds of message exchanges. With the
availability of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) in data
centers, message exchange latency can be reduced compared to
TCP, as RDMA enables kernel bypassing and thereby avoids
intermediate data copying. Retaining the performance benefits
for RDMA during its integration, however, is non-trivial and
error-prone. While the use of RDMA has previously been
explored for key/value stores, databases and distributed file
systems, agreement protocols especially for BFT have so far been
neglected. We investigate the usage of RDMA in the Reptor BFT
protocol for low-latency agreement and show first steps towards
an RDMA-enabled consensus protocol. For this, we present
RUBIN, a framework offering similar functionality to the Java
NIO selector, which can handle multiple network connections
efficiently with a single thread and is employed in several BFT
protocol implementations such as BFT-SMART and UpRight