Asynchronous BFT Consensus Made Wireless
Shuo Liu, Minghui Xu, Tianyi Sun, Xiuzhen Cheng
TL;DR
This work tackles the difficulty of deploying asynchronous BFT consensus in wireless networks by introducing ConsensusBatcher, a batching protocol that aggregates N parallel consensus components to reduce channel contention and communication overhead. By adapting HoneyBadgerBFT, BEAT, and Dumbo to wireless environments and developing lightweight threshold cryptography, the authors demonstrate substantial reductions in latency ($ ext{latency} ightarrow$ $52$–$69 ightarrow ext{52%–69%}$) and improvements in throughput ($ ext{throughput} ightarrow$ $50$–$70 ightarrow ext{50%–70%}$) across single-hop and multi-hop topologies. An open-source testbed supports five consensus protocols with both single-hop and multi-hop configurations, enabling practical evaluation and further research in asynchronous wireless BFT. The results indicate that ConsensusBatcher effectively mitigates wireless-specific bottlenecks, offering a practical path toward robust, scalable, and efficient wireless BFT systems with real-world impact on tasks like distributed sensing and autonomous coordination. The work lays groundwork for future enhancements, including satellite-network integration and the fusion of embodied AI with BFT for secure, resilient AI-enabled systems.
Abstract
Asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, known for their robustness in unpredictable environments without relying on timing assumptions, are becoming increasingly vital for wireless applications. While these protocols have proven effective in wired networks, their adaptation to wireless environments presents significant challenges. Asynchronous BFT consensus, characterized by its N parallel consensus components (e.g., asynchronous Byzantine agreement, reliable broadcast), suffers from high message complexity, leading to network congestion and inefficiency, especially in resource-constrained wireless networks. Asynchronous Byzantine agreement (ABA) protocols, a foundational component of asynchronous BFT, require careful balancing of message complexity and cryptographic overhead to achieve efficient implementation in wireless settings. Additionally, the absence of dedicated testbeds for asynchronous wireless BFT consensus protocols hinders development and performance evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose a consensus batching protocol (ConsensusBatcher), which supports both vertical and horizontal batching of multiple parallel consensus components. We leverage ConsensusBatcher to adapt three asynchronous BFT consensus protocols (HoneyBadgerBFT, BEAT, and Dumbo) from wired networks to resource-constrained wireless networks. To evaluate the performance of ConsensusBatcher-enabled consensus protocols in wireless environments, we develop and open-source a testbed for deployment and performance assessment of these protocols. Using this testbed, we demonstrate that ConsensusBatcher-based consensus reduces latency by 48% to 59% and increases throughput by 48% to 62% compared to baseline consensus protocols.