BFT Selection

One-size-fits-all protocols are hard to achieve in Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT). As an alternative, BFT users, e.g., enterprises, need an easy and efficient method to choose the most convenient protocol that matches their preferences best. The various BFT protocols that have been proposed so far differ significantly in their characteristics and performance which makes choosing the ‘preferred’ protocol hard. In addition, if the state of the deployed system is too fluctuating, then perhaps using multiple protocols at once is needed; this requires a dynamic selection mechanism to move from one protocol to another. In this paper, we present the first BFT selection model and algorithm that can be used to choose the most convenient protocol according to user preferences. The selection algorithm applies some mathematical formulas to make the selection process easy and automatic. The algorithm operates in three modes: Static, Dynamic, and Heuristic. The Static mode addresses the cases where a single protocol is needed; the Dynamic mode assumes that the system conditions are quite fluctuating and thus requires runtime decisions, and the Heuristic mode is similar to the Dynamic mode but it uses additional heuristics to improve user choices. We give some examples to describe how selection occurs. We show that our approach is automated, easy, and yields reasonable results that match reality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses selection in BFT.