On Message-based Consensus and Network Coding

Abstract

Using Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) in asynchronous networks with one-to-many information flow has already been proven to be a valid approach to maximize the channel capacities. Message-based consensus protocols such as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) adhere partially to said scenario. Protocol phases with many-to-many communication, however, still suffer from quadratic growth in the number of required transmissions to reach consensus. We present several experiments, showing that a significant improvement in the transmission efficiency in the quadratic phases is possible under very reasonable settings through combining RLNC with pBFT into a single hybrid protocol running on a selected layer of the network. Applying the same approach to other combinations of message-based consensus and network coding protocols promises not only a gain in performance, but may also improve robustness and security and open up new application scenarios for RLNC.