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European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems

EMCIS 2020: Information Systems pp 125–136Cite as

Leadership Uniformity in Raft Consensus Algorithm

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 402))

Abstract

The Raft consensus algorithm constitutes a widely-used algorithm not only in the broader area of distributed systems, ut also in private/permissioned blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric. A Raft-based distributed system (RDS) strongly relies on leader election, which involves a number of time-related parameters. In the Raft-related literature, the process according to which those parameters are set is an under-researched area. Specifically, the use of the uniform distribution is the dominant approach. Motivated by this realization, in this work, we focus on these time parameters proposing the notion of “leadership uniformity” in combination with a series of performance metrics. Leadership uniformity is based on the desirable characteristic of having equality among the nodes who serve as leaders. The proposed performance metrics are straightforward adaptations of widely-used measurements from broad disciplines such as estimation theory. The experimental results of this work justify the appropriateness of the proposed notion of leadership uniformity. Specifically, the best performance was yielded by the utilization of normal distribution from which the time parameters under investigation were drawn.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In many cases, this number should be less than the \(50\%\) of total number of nodes.

  2. 2.

    Raft can only tolerate crash failures and not malicious nodes.

  3. 3.

    In a message–passing distributed system a global clock does not apply [32], so, the timings are encoded as (numerical) indices.

  4. 4.

    https://pypi.org/project/pyraft/.

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Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the Ripple’s Impact Fund, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation (Grant id: 2018-188546).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute For the Future, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Elias Iosif, Klitos Christodoulou, Marios Touloupou & Antonios Inglezakis

Authors
  1. Elias Iosif
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  2. Klitos Christodoulou
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  3. Marios Touloupou
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  4. Antonios Inglezakis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elias Iosif .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Digital Innovation, School of Business, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Marinos Themistocleous

  2. British University in Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Maria Papadaki

  3. School of Strategy and Leadership, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Muhammad Mustafa Kamal

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Iosif, E., Christodoulou, K., Touloupou, M., Inglezakis, A. (2020). Leadership Uniformity in Raft Consensus Algorithm. In: Themistocleous, M., Papadaki, M., Kamal, M.M. (eds) Information Systems. EMCIS 2020. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 402. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63396-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63396-7_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-63395-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-63396-7

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