Concurrent Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Integration of Blockchain and Supply Chain

Abstract

Currently, the integration of the supply chain and blockchain is promising, as blockchain successfully eliminates the bullwhip effect in the supply chain. Generally, concurrent Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus method, named C-PBFT, is powerful to deal with the consensus inefficiencies, caused by the fast node expansion in the supply chain. However, due to the tremendous complicated transactions in the supply chain, it remains challenging to select the credible primary peers in the concurrent clusters. To address this challenge, the peers in the supply chain are classified into several clusters by analyzing the historic transactions in the ledger. Then, the primary peer for each cluster is identified by reputation assessment. Finally, the performance of C-PBFT is evaluated by conducting experiments in Fabric.