BYZANTINE FAULT TOLERANT CONSENSUS FOR HYPERLEDGER FABRIC

The decentralized systems take a significant role in the public and private sectors that serve different needs of the organizations. The heart of those systems in any system is the dissemination protocol. Hyperledger Fabric is a highly recommended option for production-ready distribution network systems. Though Hyperledger Fabric is intended to have any consensus protocol as a pluggable module, it does not provide technical guidance on how to plug a consensus module there. Furthermore, the first release of Fabric used Kafka as its consensus protocol and then switched to Raft as its consensus protocol. Both Kafka and Raft are Crash fault-tolerant (CFT) protocols that do not support Byzantine fault participants. This paper examines the required steps to plug a consensus protocol into Hyperledger Fabrics and, more importantly, integrates the Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol BDLS into Hyperledger Fabrics. The consensus protocol BDLS is among one of the most efficient and promising BFT protocols for blockchains. The paper presents detailed technical insights in integrating the BDLS protocol into Hyperledger Fabric, highlighting the intricacies and benefits of this integration. In the last part of the paper, we compare the performances
of Raft and BDLS based Hyperledger Fabrics.
The study shows that Hyperledger Fabric, employing BDLS fault tolerance protocols, matches the performance of the existing Raft-based Fabric. Our BDLS Fabric implementation, featuring BFT consensus, achieves a throughput of 2717 transactions per second (TPS), nearly on par with Raft-Fabric's 3083 TPS, despite Raft-Fabric lacking support for BFT consensus. All the codes are available in the GitHub repository: \url{https://github.com/BDLS-bft/fabric}.