Scalable and leaderless Byzantine consensus in cloud computing environments

Traditional Byzantine consensus in distributed systems requires n ≥ 3f + 1, where n is the number of nodes. In this paper, we present a scalable and leaderless Byzantine consensus implementation based on gossip, requiring only n ≥ 2f + 1 nodes. Unlike conventional distributed systems, the network topology of cloud computing systems is often not fully connected, but loosely coupled and layered. Hence, we revisit the Byzantine consensus problem in cloud computing environments, in which each node maintains some number of neighbors, called local view. The message complexity of our Byzantine consensus scheme is O(n), instead of O(n²). Experimental results and correctness proof show that our Byzantine consensus scheme can solve the Byzantine consensus problem safely in a scalable way without a bottleneck and a leader in cloud computing environments.