BFT Protocols Under Fire

Much recent work on Byzantine state machine replication focuses on protocols with improved performance under benign conditions (LANs, homogeneous replicas, limited crash faults), with relatively little evaluation under typical, practical conditions (WAN delays, packet loss, transient disconnection, shared resources). This makes it difficult for system designers to choose the appropriate protocol for a real target deployment. Moreover, most protocol implementations differ in their choice of runtime environment, crypto library, and transport, hindering direct protocol comparisons even under similar conditions. We present a simulation environment for such protocols that combines a declarative networking system with a robust network simulator. Protocols can be rapidly implemented from pseudocode in the high-level declarative language of the former, while network conditions and (measured) costs of communication packages and crypto primitives can be plugged into the latter. We show that the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: NSDI
• Authors: Atul Singh, Tathagata Das, Petros Maniatis, Peter Druschel, Timothy Roscoe
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Conditions, Network Conditions, NSDI 2008, Protocol Implementations