Fair and Efficient Gossip in Hyperledger Fabric

Permissioned blockchains are supported by identified but individually untrustworthy nodes, collectively maintaining a replicated ledger whose content is trusted. The Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain system targets high-throughput transaction processing. Fabric uses a set of nodes tasked with the ordering of transactions using consensus. Additional peers endorse and validate transactions, and maintain a copy of the ledger. The ability to quickly disseminate new transaction blocks from ordering nodes to all peers is critical for both performance and consistency. Broadcast is handled by a gossip protocol, using randomized exchanges of blocks between peers. We show that the current implementation of gossip in Fabric leads to heavy tail distributions of block propagation latencies, impacting performance, consistency, and fairness. We contribute a novel design for gossip in Fabric that simultaneously optimizes propagation time, tail latency and bandwidth consumption. Using a 100-node cluster, we show that our enhanced gossip allows the dissemination of blocks to all peers more than 10 times faster than with the original implementation, while decreasing the overall network bandwidth consumption by more than 40%. With a high throughput and concurrent application, this results in 17% to 36% fewer invalidated transactions for different block sizes.