Paper 2024/472

Sailfish: Towards Improving the Latency of DAG-based BFT

Abstract

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based BFT protocols balance consensus efforts across different parties and maintain high throughput even when some designated parties fail. However, existing DAG-based BFT protocols exhibit long latency to commit decisions, primarily because they have a \emph{leader} every 2 or more ``rounds''. Recent works, such as Shoal (FC'23) and Mysticeti, have deemed supporting a leader vertex in each round particularly difficult, if not impossible. Consequently, even under honest leaders, these protocols require high latency (or communication complexity) to commit the proposal submitted by the leader (leader vertex) and additional latency to commit other proposals (non-leader vertices). In this work, we present Sailfish, the first DAG-based BFT that supports a leader vertex in each round. Under honest leaders, Sailfish maintains a commit latency of one reliable broadcast (RBC) round plus $$ to commit the leader vertex (where $$ is the actual transmission latency of a message) and only an additional RBC round to commit non-leader vertices. We also extend Sailfish to Multi-leader Sailfish, which facilitates multiple leaders within a single round and commits all leader vertices in a round with a latency of one RBC round plus $$. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our protocols introduce significantly lower latency overhead compared to existing DAG-based protocols, with similar throughput.