Aurora: Leaderless State-Machine Replication with High Throughput

Hao Lu; Jian Liu; Kui Ren

Paper 2023/1463

Aurora: Leaderless State-Machine Replication with High Throughput

Hao Lu

, Zhejiang University

Jian Liu, Zhejiang University

Kui Ren, Zhejiang University

Abstract

State-machine replication (SMR) allows a {deterministic} state machine to be replicated across a set of replicas and handle clients' requests as a single machine. Most existing SMR protocols are leader-based requiring a leader to order requests and coordinate the protocol. This design places a disproportionately high load on the leader, inevitably impairing the scalability. If the leader fails, a complex and bug-prone fail-over protocol is needed to switch to a new leader. An adversary can also exploit the fail-over protocol to slow down the protocol. In this paper, we propose a crash-fault tolerant SMR named Aurora, with the following properties: • Leaderless: it does not require a leader, hence completely get rid of the fail-over protocol. • Scalable: it can scale up to 11 replicas. • Robust: it behaves well even under a poor network connection. We provide a full-fledged implementation of Aurora and systematically evaluate its performance. Our benchmark results show that Aurora achieves a throughput of around two million Transactions Per Second (TPS), up to 8.7X higher than the state-of-the-art leaderless SMR.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Major revision. IEEE Transactions on Computers
DOI: 10.1109/TC.2025.3540656
Keywords: Crash fault-tolerance state machine replication distributed systems
Contact author(s): luhao @ zju edu cn
jian liu @ zju edu cn
kuiren @ zju edu cn
History: 2025-04-13: last of 5 revisions; 2023-09-24: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2023/1463
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1463,
      author = {Hao Lu and Jian Liu and Kui Ren},
      title = {Aurora: Leaderless State-Machine Replication with High Throughput},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1463},
      year = {2023},
      doi = {10.1109/TC.2025.3540656},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1463}
}