Experimental performance comparison of byzantine fault-tolerant protocols for data centers

In this paper, we compare performance of several Byzantine agreement algorithms, including NCBA, a network coding based algorithm. Unlike existing practical BFT protocols such as PBFT by Castro and Liskov [1], which utilize collision-resistant hash functions to reduce traffic load for BFT, NCBA uses a computationally efficient error-detection network coding scheme. Since NCBA does not rely on any hash function, it is always correct rather than correct only with high probability as PBFT. Through extensive experiments, we verified that NCBA performs at least as well as Digest, without relying on any cryptographic assumption on the hardness of breaking the hash function. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of BFT with network coding.