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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.12

Efficient Byzantine Reliable Broadcast in the Failure Case

Authors: Thomas Locher

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 361, 29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025)

Abstract

Reliable broadcast is a fundamental primitive in distributed computing that is widely used in various applications. Several new reliable broadcast algorithms have been presented in recent years, primarily focusing on reducing the communication complexity, which is the total number of exchanged bits in the worst case. While significant progress has been achieved, all proposed algorithms share a common weakness. Executions may fail, i.e., no message is ever delivered, while incurring a communication complexity equal or nearly equal to the communication complexity of executions where a message is delivered. In fact, a single Byzantine node, acting as the dedicated sender, is sufficient to trigger such executions, causing all nodes to consume bandwidth in vain. This paper introduces the novel concept of a reliable broadcast detector, a distributed algorithm that can be coupled with a reliable broadcast algorithm to minimize the communication complexity of failed executions. Two concrete detectors are presented with different requirements and properties. Additionally, reliable broadcast algorithms that utilize detectors are introduced, the main algorithm guaranteeing an overhead factor, compared to an ideal failure-free execution, that tends to 2 as the network size increases. Furthermore, a lower bound is proven that an overhead factor of 5/3 is inevitable when the sender initially broadcasts the message, as is the case for the proposed algorithm. Therefore, it achieves a bound that is close to optimal for any algorithm with this property.

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Thomas Locher. Efficient Byzantine Reliable Broadcast in the Failure Case. In 29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 361, pp. 12:1-12:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{locher:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.12,
  author =	{Locher, Thomas},
  title =	{{Efficient Byzantine Reliable Broadcast in the Failure Case}},
  booktitle =	{29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025)},
  pages =	{12:1--12:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-409-3},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{361},
  editor =	{Arusoaie, Andrei and Onica, Emanuel and Spear, Michael and Tucci-Piergiovanni, Sara},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.12},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-251854},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.12},
  annote =	{Keywords: asynchronous networks, reliable broadcast, communication complexity}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.16

Byzantine Reliable Broadcast with Low Communication and Time Complexity

Authors: Thomas Locher

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 324, 28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024)

Abstract

Byzantine reliable broadcast is a fundamental problem in distributed computing, which has been studied extensively over the past decades. State-of-the-art algorithms are predominantly based on the approach to share encoded fragments of the broadcast message, yielding an asymptotically optimal communication complexity when the message size exceeds the network size, a condition frequently encountered in practice. However, algorithms following the standard coding approach incur an overhead factor of at least 3, which can already be a burden for bandwidth-constrained applications. Minimizing this overhead is an important objective with immediate benefits to protocols that use a reliable broadcast routine as a building block. This paper introduces a novel mechanism to lower the communication and computational complexity. Two algorithms are presented that employ this mechanism to reliably broadcast messages in an asynchronous network where less than a third of all nodes are Byzantine. The first algorithm reduces the overhead factor to 2 and has a time complexity of 3 if the sender is honest, whereas the second algorithm attains an optimal time complexity of 2 with the same overhead factor in the absence of equivocation. Moreover, an optimization is proposed that reduces the overhead factor to 3/2 under normal operation in practice. Lastly, a lower bound is proved that an overhead factor lower than 3/2 cannot be achieved for a relevant class of reliable broadcast algorithms.

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Thomas Locher. Byzantine Reliable Broadcast with Low Communication and Time Complexity. In 28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 324, pp. 16:1-16:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{locher:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.16,
  author =	{Locher, Thomas},
  title =	{{Byzantine Reliable Broadcast with Low Communication and Time Complexity}},
  booktitle =	{28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-360-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{324},
  editor =	{Bonomi, Silvia and Galletta, Letterio and Rivi\`{e}re, Etienne and Schiavoni, Valerio},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-225524},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: Asynchronous Networks, Reliable Broadcast, Communication Complexity}
}

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Efficient Byzantine Reliable Broadcast in the Failure Case

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Byzantine Reliable Broadcast with Low Communication and Time Complexity

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