Improving Asynchrony Resilience in Dynamically Available Total-Order Broadcast Protocols

09/11/2023

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by   Francesco D'Amato, et al.

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Dynamically available total-order broadcast (TOB) protocols are essential in permissionless systems in which participants may unpredictably go offline and later come back online. Existing dynamically-available protocols are synchronous protocols, and they lose their safety guarantees during periods of asynchrony. This is a major issue in practice. In this paper, we explore the challenge of tolerating bounded periods of asynchrony in dynamically-available TOB protocols that ensure safety deterministically. We propose to trade off assumptions limiting the online/offline churn rate in exchange for tolerating bounded asynchronous periods through the use of a configurable message-expiration period. We show how to apply this idea to a state-of-the-art protocol to make it tolerate bounded periods of asynchrony.