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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
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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