A Survey of Distributed Consensus Protocols for Blockchain Networks

By Yang Xiao, Ning Zhang, Wenjing Lou, Yiwei Thomas Hou. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2019

828 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology behind the security and performance of blockchain. From incremental modifications of Nakamoto consensus protocol to innovative alternative consensus mechanisms, many consensus protocols have been proposed to improve the performance of the blockchain network itself or to accommodate other specific application needs. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review and analysis on the state-of-the-art blockchain consensus protocols. To facilitate the discussion of our analysis, we first introduce the key definitions and relevant results in the classic theory of fault tolerance which help to lay the foundation for further discussion. We identify five core components of a blockchain consensus protocol, namely, block proposal, block validation, information propagation, block finalization, and incentive mechanism. A wide spectrum of blockchain consensus protocols are then carefully reviewed accompanied by algorithmic abstractions and vulnerability analyses. The surveyed consensus protocols are analyzed using the five-component framework and compared with respect to different performance metrics. These analyses and comparisons provide us new insights in the fundamental differences of various proposals in terms of their suitable application scenarios, key assumptions, expected fault tolerance, scalability, drawbacks and trade-offs. We believe this survey will provide blockchain developers and researchers a comprehensive view on the state-of-the-art consensus protocols and facilitate the process of designing future protocols.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20d82e2cbf460df9fd7d1b461511e729d0e54f90

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Citations in the corpus

A Comprehensive Review of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms (2021, methodology): “Another investigation, by Xiao et al. [4], classiﬁes the algorithms into Namakato-based and variations, PoS-based, and other emerging consensus protocols.”
Internet of Things (IoT): A Review of Its Enabling Technologies in Healthcare Applications, Standards Protocols, Security, and Market Opportunities (2021, methodology): “To differentiate the distinct act of surveyed protocols, they are analyzed using several frameworks to implement suitable applications, such as fault tolerance, drawbacks of the security, scalability, and tradeoffs [164].”
A Survey on Ethereum Systems Security (2019, background): “Fifth, there are surveys on blockchain consensus protocols [67, 78, 179, 186] and blockchain-based applications in IoT security [122].”
A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security (2021, background): “Consensus protocols [157] are there to resolve any potential conﬂict between contractual parties.”
Blockchain-based food supply chain traceability: a case study in the dairy sector (2020, background): “For more information about the security of Ethereum and its smart contract framework, the interested reader may refer to Xiao et al. (2020) and Chen et al. (2019), respectively.”