research-article

Kadcast: A Structured Approach to Broadcast in Blockchain Networks

Authors:

Florian TschorschAuthors Info & Claims

AFT '19: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies

Pages 199 - 213

https://doi.org/10.1145/3318041.3355469

Published: 21 October 2019 Publication History

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 and 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.

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cover image ACM Conferences

AFT '19: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies

October 2019

240 pages

ISBN:9781450367325

DOI:10.1145/3318041

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 21 October 2019

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Guzman DTrossen DOtt JKutscher DZhang L(2024)Communication Cost for Permissionless Distributed Consensus at Internet ScaleProceedings of the ACM Conext-2024 Workshop on the Decentralization of the Internet10.1145/3694809.3700743(28-35)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3694809.3700743
Cortes-Goicoechea MKiraly CRyajov DMuNoz-Tapia JBautista-Gomez L(2024)Scalability limitations of Kademlia DHTs when enabling Data Availability Sampling in EthereumProceedings of the 2024 6th Blockchain and Internet of Things Conference10.1145/3688225.3688236(83-91)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3688225.3688236
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