HCA: Hashchain-Based Consensus Acceleration Via Re-Voting

Zijian Zhang, Xuyang Liu, Meng Li*, Hao Yin, Liehuang Zhu*, Bakh Khoussainov, Keke Gai

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In the context of consortium blockchain, consensus protocols set permission mechanisms to maintain a relatively fixed group of participants. They can easily use distributed consistent algorithms for achieving deterministic and efficient consensus and generate incessant blocks as the ledger. However, most of the existing consensus protocols do not sufficiently leverage the chain structure of blocks, and therefore leaving room for performance improvement. In this paper, we first propose a Hashchain-based Consensus Acceleration (HCA) protocol. The HCA protocol enables a leader to generate blocks that contain a quorum of votes on the previous block, and allow voters to re-vote for accelerating the block generation to Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols. Then, we present a rolling-based leader selection (RLS) scheme to further optimize the HCA protocol. In the RLS scheme, the leader is changed in a round-robin fashion. Finally, theoretical analysis proves the safety, liveness and responsiveness of the optimized HCA protocol, while experimental evaluation shows that the optimized HCA protocol outperforms the existing BFT consensus protocols, from the viewpoint of efficiency.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)775-788
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Volume21
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2024

Keywords

  • Acceleration
  • blockchain
  • byzantine fault tolerance
  • consensus
  • re-voting

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'HCA: Hashchain-Based Consensus Acceleration Via Re-Voting'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this