EBFT: A Hierarchical and Group-Based Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus Algorithm

Consensus algorithm is a key component of the blockchain technology, and also a hot topic in distributed system research. Under the background that blockchain technology has entered the development stage of consortium blockchain, the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), proposed by Miguel and Liskov in 1999, occupies an vital position. Although PBFT has many advantages, it does not scale well because of O(n²) communication complexity. In order to solve this drawback, we present a hierarchical and group-based BFT consensus algorithm — efficient BFT (EBFT). It utilizes a novel network topology to effectively reduce communication times among nodes and provides O(n) communication complexity. The experimental results show that EBFT optimizes the consensus process involving large-scale nodes, so that the consortium blockchain can be applied to a wider range of application scenarios.