Company
Date Published
Author
Chainlink Labs Research
Word count
2879
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The text explores the Byzantine View Synchronization (BVS) problem in consensus protocols, highlighting its role as a bottleneck in leader-based systems under partial synchrony settings. Initially focused on single-shot consensus, the discussion progresses to multi-shot scenarios, or State-Machine-Replication (SMR), which demands repeated BVS resolution. Existing protocols face trade-offs between communication overhead and latency when encountering Byzantine leaders. A new protocol, Lumiere, is introduced to address these challenges by providing quick recovery from Byzantine leaders with optimal communication and latency. Lumiere combines elements from previous protocols like Cogsworth and LP-22, incorporating techniques to adjust view timers based on network conditions, thereby ensuring responsive progress even with faulty leaders. Additionally, the text compares various Pacemaker protocols based on latency and communication efficiency, illustrating Lumiere's advantages, such as eliminating the need for initial clock synchronization while maintaining optimal latency and communication performance. The article concludes by positioning Lumiere as a significant advancement in achieving efficient and resilient consensus in distributed systems.