All-to-all Communication for Multiparty RPC

Abstract

Quorum systems, like replicated state machines, are essential in distributed sys- tems, but building correct and high-performance systems is challenging due to the asynchronous environments they operate in. Gorums is a novel framework that simplifies the creation of quorum-based systems, alleviating developers of the complexities associated with building fault-tolerant services. However, it cur- rently lacks support for all-to-all communication, which is crucial for robust inter- node communication and is often used in consensus algorithms like Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Paxos.

This thesis analyzes the design requirements needed to facilitate all-to-all com- munication in quorum-based systems. We extend Gorums with a new broad- casting framework, introducing an easy-to-use abstraction named BroadcastCall. BroadcastCall is an RPC invocation to a group of servers communicating in an all- to-all pattern. Furthermore, it relates individual messages sent by the servers to a single abstraction called broadcast request. To evaluate the broadcasting frame- work, we implement both PBFT and Paxos using the framework and compare them to baseline implementations. The results demonstrate that the framework delivers performance comparable to the baseline implementations without incur- ring significant overhead.