---
OA_place: publisher
OA_type: hybrid
PlanS_conform: '1'
_id: '21017'
abstract:
- lang: eng
text: With the growing interest in blockchains, permissioned approaches to consensus
have received increasing attention. Unfortunately, the BFT consensus algorithms
that are the backbone of most of these blockchains scale poorly and offer limited
throughput. In fact, many state-of-the-art BFT consensus algorithms require a
single leader process to receive and validate votes from a quorum of processes
and then broadcast the result, which is inherently non-scalable. Recent approaches
avoid this bottleneck by using dissemination/aggregation trees to propagate values
and collect and validate votes. However, the use of trees increases the round
latency, which limits the throughput for deeper trees. In this paper we propose
Kauri, a BFT communication abstraction that sustains high throughput as the system
size grows by leveraging a novel pipelining technique to perform scalable dissemination
and aggregation on trees. Furthermore, when the number of faults is moderate (arguably
the most common case in practice), our construction is able to recover from faults
in an optimal number of reconfiguration steps. We implemented and experimentally
evaluated Kauri with up to 800 processes. Our results show that Kauri outperforms
the throughput of state-of-the-art permissioned blockchain protocols, by up to
58x without compromising latency. Interestingly, in some cases, the parallelization
provided by Kauri can also decrease the latency.
acknowledgement: We thank the ACM TOCS Editors and the reviewers for their help in
improving the manuscript. This work was partially supported by CAPES - Brazil (Coordenação
de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior) and byFundação para a Ciência e
Tecnologia (FCT) under project UIDB/50021/2020 and grant 2020.05270.BD, and via
project COSMOS (via the OE with ref. PTDC/EEI-COM/29271/2017, via the łPrograma
Operacional Regional de Lisboa na sua componente FEDER” with ref. Lisboa-01-0145-FEDER-029271)
and project Angainor with reference LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-031456, grant agreement
number 952226, and project GLOG, with reference LISBOA2030-FEDER-00771200, and project
BIG (Enhancing the research and innovation potential of Tecnico through blockchain
technologies and design Innovation for social Good), and project ScalableCosmosConsensus,
and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) SFB project SpyCoDe F8502 and the Vienna Science
and Technology Fund (WWTF) project SCALE2 CT22-045
article_number: '12'
article_processing_charge: Yes (via OA deal)
article_type: original
author:
- first_name: Ray
full_name: Neiheiser, Ray
id: f09651b9-fec0-11ec-b5d8-934aff0e52a4
last_name: Neiheiser
orcid: 0000-0001-7227-8309
- first_name: Miguel
full_name: Matos, Miguel
last_name: Matos
- first_name: Luis
full_name: Rodrigues, Luis
last_name: Rodrigues
citation:
ama: 'Neiheiser R, Matos M, Rodrigues L. Kauri: BFT consensus with pipelined tree-based
dissemination and aggregation. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 2026;44(2).
doi:10.1145/3769423'
apa: 'Neiheiser, R., Matos, M., & Rodrigues, L. (2026). Kauri: BFT consensus
with pipelined tree-based dissemination and aggregation. ACM Transactions on
Computer Systems. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3769423'
chicago: 'Neiheiser, Ray, Miguel Matos, and Luis Rodrigues. “Kauri: BFT Consensus
with Pipelined Tree-Based Dissemination and Aggregation.” ACM Transactions
on Computer Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1145/3769423.'
ieee: 'R. Neiheiser, M. Matos, and L. Rodrigues, “Kauri: BFT consensus with pipelined
tree-based dissemination and aggregation,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems,
vol. 44, no. 2. Association for Computing Machinery, 2026.'
ista: 'Neiheiser R, Matos M, Rodrigues L. 2026. Kauri: BFT consensus with pipelined
tree-based dissemination and aggregation. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.
44(2), 12.'
mla: 'Neiheiser, Ray, et al. “Kauri: BFT Consensus with Pipelined Tree-Based Dissemination
and Aggregation.” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 44, no. 2,
12, Association for Computing Machinery, 2026, doi:10.1145/3769423.'
short: R. Neiheiser, M. Matos, L. Rodrigues, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
44 (2026).
corr_author: '1'
das_tickbox: '0'
date_created: 2026-01-20T10:14:23Z
date_published: 2026-05-01T00:00:00Z
date_updated: 2026-07-23T10:07:17Z
day: '01'
ddc:
- '000'
department:
- _id: KrPi
doi: 10.1145/3769423
file:
- access_level: open_access
checksum: b64822f3d2bcac3c68c887ced45a6008
content_type: application/pdf
creator: dernst
date_created: 2026-07-23T10:04:06Z
date_updated: 2026-07-23T10:04:06Z
file_id: '22392'
file_name: 2026_TransCompSyst_Neiheiser.pdf
file_size: 676867
relation: main_file
success: 1
file_date_updated: 2026-07-23T10:04:06Z
fulldoi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3769423
has_accepted_license: '1'
intvolume: ' 44'
issue: '2'
keyword:
- Distributed systems
- byzantine fault tolerance
- blockchain
- vote aggregation
- pipelining
language:
- iso: eng
month: '05'
oa: 1
oa_version: Published Version
project:
- _id: 34a1b658-11ca-11ed-8bc3-c75229f0241e
grant_number: F8502
name: Interface Theory for Security and Privacy
- _id: 7bdd2f70-9f16-11ee-852c-b7950bc6d277
grant_number: ICT22-045
name: SeCure, privAte, and interoperabLe layEr 2
publication: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
publication_identifier:
eissn:
- 1557-7333
issn:
- 0734-2071
publication_status: published
publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
quality_controlled: '1'
researchdata_availability: no
scopus_import: '1'
status: public
supplementarymaterial: no
title: 'Kauri: BFT consensus with pipelined tree-based dissemination and aggregation'
tmp:
image: /images/cc_by.png
legal_code_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
name: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0)
short: CC BY (4.0)
type: journal_article
user_id: 2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87
volume: 44
year: '2026'
...