Duet: Co-Optimizing P2P Message Propagation and Rotating-Leader Consensus

Abstract

In blockchain systems, peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks play a crucial role in providing reliable, scalable and efficient message-delivery services to upper layers. However, the consensus layer and the underlying P2P network remain mutually opaque in existing blockchains, waiving the opportunity for further improvement. In contrast to other P2P applications, blockchain can naturally be abstracted as a state machine. We therefore leverage this abstraction to record network topologies and latencies in a trusted and coordinated manner. With this support, we propose three improvements to rotating-leader consensus protocols and their underlying P2P networks: (1) accelerating leader rotation; (2) introducing a reliable-broadcast paradigm that employs tree-based dissemination in the normal case and falls back to gossip only when necessary; and (3) constructing latency-aware dissemination trees. We integrate the above ideas into Tendermint and libp2p, and conduct empirical evaluation on Amazon EC2 platform using up to 300 nodes distributed across 10 regions. The results demonstrate that, compared with gossip-based dissemination over the same topology, our prototype improves peak throughput by up to $7.26\times$.