Healthor: Heterogeneity-aware Flow Control in DLTs to Increase Performance and Decentralization

Permissionless reputation-based distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have been proposed to overcome blockchains’ shortcomings in terms of performance and scalability, and to enable feeless messages to power the machine-to-machine economy. These DLTs allow machines with widely heterogeneous capabilities to actively participate in message generation and consensus. However, the open nature of such DLTs can lead to the centralization of decision-making power, thus defeating the purpose of building a decentralized network. In this article, we introduce Healthor, a novel heterogeneity-aware flow-control mechanism for permissionless reputation-based DLTs. Healthor formalizes node heterogeneity by defining a health value as a function of its incoming message queue occupancy. We show that health signals can be used effectively by neighboring nodes to dynamically flow control messages while maintaining high decentralization. We perform extensive simulations, and show a 23% increase in throughput, a 76% decrease in latency and four times increased node participation in consensus compared to state-of-the-art. To the best of our knowledge, Healthor is the first system to systematically explore the ramifications of heterogeneity on DLTs and proposes a dynamic, heterogeneity-aware flow control. Healthor’s source code ( https://github.com/jonastheis/healthor ) and simulation result data set ( https://zenodo.org/record/4573698 ) are both publicly available.