CT-PBFT: A Comprehensive Trust-Based Practical Byzantine Consensus Algorithm

Abstract

Blockchain technology has become a foundational component for constructing decentralized, secure, and immutable distributed systems. The consensus mechanism ensures that all nodes in a blockchain network reach agreement on a single version of truth, thereby maintaining data consistency across the distributed ledger. The earliest blockchain application, Bitcoin, adopts Proof of Work (PoW), which provides high security at the cost of substantial computational power and energy consumption. Ethereum employs Proof of Stake (PoS) to reduce energy consumption, though it introduces new challenges in the fairness of node selection. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) has gained significant attention for its ability to achieve more efficient consensus by reducing computational and energy demands. However, traditional PBFT still requires extensive message exchanges and voting among nodes, leading to significant communication overhead in large-scale networks. To address these limitations and further enhance the performance of PBFT, we propose the Comprehensive Trust-based PBFT (CTPBFT) algorithm. CT-PBFT reduces communication overhead by excluding nodes with low trust scores from the consensus process, thereby optimizing overall efficiency. We conducted a thorough analysis and simulation of CT-PBFT, and the results demonstrate that CT-PBFT outperforms traditional PBFT in terms of consensus latency and throughput. Moreover, CT-PBFT is more effective than other trust-based PBFT variants in swiftly eliminating Byzantine nodes, providing a robust and efficient solution for secure communication in distributed systems.