Scalable Network-Coded PBFT Consensus Algorithm

Abstract

We suggest a general framework for network-coded Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) consensus for enabling agreement among distributed nodes under Byzantine attacks. The suggested protocol generalizes existing replication and sharding schemes which are frequently used for consensus in current blockchain systems. Using the proposed algorithm, it is possible to reach a consensus when the available bandwidth is considerably smaller on individual links compared to that required for conventional schemes. It is shown that there exists an upper bound on the number of nodes that can participate in the protocol, given a maximum bandwidth constraint across all pairwise links. Furthermore, the protocol that achieves the upper bound is provided by using a set of constant weight codes.