Paper 2019/876
Kadcast: A Structured Approach to Broadcast in Blockchain Networks
Elias Rohrer and Florian Tschorsch
Abstract
In order to propagate transactions and blocks, today’s blockchain systems rely on unstructured peer-to-peer overlay networks. In such networks, broadcast is known to be an inefficient operation in terms of message complexity and overhead. In addition to the impact on the system performance, inefficient or delayed block propagation may have severe consequences regarding security and fairness of the consensus layer. Therefore, we introduce Kadcast, a novel peer-to-peer protocol for block propagation in blockchain networks. Kadcast utilizes the well-known structured overlay topology of Kademlia to realize an efficient broadcast operation with tunable overhead. As our protocol is based on UDP, we incorporate forward error correction (FEC) to increase reliability while still maintaining its lightweight protocol architecture. To this end, we build a probabilistic model to analyze Kadcast’s resilience to packet losses as well as random and adversarial node failures. Moreover, we evaluate Kadcast’s block delivery performance, broadcast reliability, efficiency, and security based on advanced network simulations, which confirm the merits of the Kadcast protocol.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. AFT '19: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Advances in Financial Technologies
- Keywords
- broadcastblockchaincryptocurrencypeer-to-peernetworking
- Contact author(s)
- elias rohrer @ tu-berlin de
- History
- 2019-08-01: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/876
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/876,
author = {Elias Rohrer and Florian Tschorsch},
title = {Kadcast: A Structured Approach to Broadcast in Blockchain Networks},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/876},
year = {2019},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/876}
}
