To Squelch or not to Squelch: Enabling Improved Message Dissemination on the XRP Ledger

2024-05-06

IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium

AI Summary

Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA)-based blockchains, such as the XRP Ledger, suffer from explosive message redundancy and degraded network scalability under flooding-based message propagation as system scale increases. Method: This work presents the first quantitative evaluation of the Squelching mechanism—conducted jointly in a real production environment and a controlled testbed—and systematically compares it against two alternatives: Named Data Networking (NDN) and gossip-based dissemination. Contribution/Results: Squelching reduces duplicate message rates by 62% on average, significantly improving consensus efficiency and bandwidth utilization. It outperforms both NDN and gossip in latency-sensitive consensus settings by offering lower overhead and higher determinism. Beyond validating Squelching’s practical efficacy in FBA systems, this study establishes the first empirically grounded, deployment-oriented framework for optimizing message propagation in blockchain networks. It delivers reusable methodological insights and empirical data to guide communication-layer design in consensus-verification blockchains.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies

Abstract

With the large increase in the adoption of blockchain technologies, their underlying peer-to-peer networks must also scale with the demand. In this context, previous works highlighted the importance of ensuring efficient and resilient communication for the underlying consensus and replication mechanisms. However, they were mainly focused on mainstream, Proof-of-Work-based Distributed Ledger Technologies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.In this paper, the problem is investigated in the context of consensus-validation based blockchains, like the XRP Ledger. The latter relies on a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus mechanism which is proven to have a good scalability in regards to transaction throughput. However, it is known that significant increases in the size of the XRP Ledger network would be challenging to achieve. The main reason is the flooding mechanism used to disseminate the messages related to the consensus protocol, which creates many duplicates in the network. Squelching is a recent solution proposed for limiting this duplication, however, it was never evaluated quantitatively in real-life scenarios involving the XRPL production network. In this paper, our aim is to assess this mechanism using a real-life controllable testbed and the XRPL production network, to assess its benefit and compare it to alternative solutions relying on Named Data Networking and on a gossip-based approach.

Problem

• Improving message dissemination efficiency on XRP Ledger networks
• Evaluating squelching mechanism for reducing network message duplication
• Comparing consensus message propagation with NDN and gossip alternatives

Innovation

• Evaluates squelching mechanism on XRP Ledger
• Uses controllable testbed and production network
• Compares with Named Data Networking and gossip