BoR: Toward High-Performance Permissioned Blockchain in RDMA-enabled Network

Known as a distributed ledger, blockchain is becoming prevalent due to its decentralization, traceability and tamper resistance. Particularly, permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric shows great application prospects as the infrastructure of IoT security, credit management, etc. Many cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, Oracle and IBM cloud already offer blockchain as a service, in which tenants can quickly build permissioned blockchain and run smart contract based applications. However, the transactions throughput and scalability in the permissioned blockchain are not ideal, despite many optimization efforts in consensus protocol and parallel chain. As far as we observe, there are 3 issues: excessive CPU scheduling, inefficient new block broadcast confirmation and high block sync delay when a new node just joins. Inspired by the emerging RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) network, we propose BoR, an RDMA-based permissioned blockchain framework. By offloading the block transfer transaction into RDMA NICs, it can increase block broadcast speed and reduce block sync delay. We exploit the RDMA primitives to redesign block synchronization protocol and accelerate DPoS consensus process for higher throughput and lower latency in kernel-bypass manner. As demonstrated in our evaluation with different workloads, BoR with lower CPU utilization significantly outperform the state-of-the-art EoS blockchain.