Recent developments in blockchain technology have inspired innovative new designs in resilient distributed and database systems. At their core, these blockchain applications typically use Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to maintain a common state across all replicas, even if some replicas are faulty or malicious. Unfortunately, existing consensus protocols are not designed to deal with
geo-scale deployments
in which many replicas spread across a geographically large area participate in consensus.
To address this, we present the Geo-Scale Byzantine Fault-Tolerant consensus protocol (GeoBFT). GeoBFT is designed for excellent scalability by using a topological-aware grouping of replicas in local clusters, by introducing parallelization of consensus at the local level, and by minimizing communication between clusters. To validate our vision of high-performance geo-scale resilient distributed systems, we implement GeoBFT in our efficient ResilientDB permissioned blockchain fabric. We show that GeoBFT is not only sound and provides great scalability, but also outperforms state-of-the-art consensus protocols by a factor of six in geo-scale deployments.
