@inproceedings{12168,
  abstract     = {Advances in blockchains have influenced the State-Machine-Replication (SMR) world and many state-of-the-art blockchain-SMR solutions are based on two pillars: Chaining and Leader-rotation. A predetermined round-robin mechanism used for Leader-rotation, however, has an undesirable behavior: crashed parties become designated leaders infinitely often, slowing down overall system performance. In this paper, we provide a new Leader-Aware SMR framework that, among other desirable properties, formalizes a Leader-utilization requirement that bounds the number of rounds whose leaders are faulty in crash-only executions.
We introduce Carousel, a novel, reputation-based Leader-rotation solution to achieve Leader-Aware SMR. The challenge in adaptive Leader-rotation is that it cannot rely on consensus to determine a leader, since consensus itself needs a leader. Carousel uses the available on-chain information to determine a leader locally and achieves Liveness despite this difficulty. A HotStuff implementation fitted with Carousel demonstrates drastic performance improvements: it increases throughput over 2x in faultless settings and provided a 20x throughput increase and 5x latency reduction in the presence of faults.},
  author       = {Cohen, Shir and Gelashvili, Rati and Kokoris Kogias, Eleftherios and Li, Zekun and Malkhi, Dahlia and Sonnino, Alberto and Spiegelman, Alexander},
  booktitle    = {International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security},
  isbn         = {9783031182822},
  issn         = {1611-3349},
  location     = {Grenada},
  pages        = {279--295},
  publisher    = {Springer Nature},
  title        = {{Be aware of your leaders}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_13},
  volume       = {13411},
  year         = {2022},
}