🤖 AI Summary
Standard Raft suffers from high message round-trips, strong leader dependency, and substantial communication overhead in dynamic distributed environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Fast Raft—a hierarchical consensus protocol. Its core innovations include a layered architecture and a fast path for log commitment, enabling significant reductions in message rounds and leader load while preserving Raft’s safety and liveness guarantees. Node communication is implemented via gRPC, and the system is deployed across multiple AWS Availability Zones using Kubernetes to ensure high availability and scalability for empirical evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that, under low packet-loss conditions, Fast Raft achieves a 42% throughput improvement and reduces average log-commit latency by 37%, substantially enhancing consensus performance and practicality in dynamic settings.
📝 Abstract
We present the first open-source implementation and evaluation of Fast Raft, a hierarchical consensus protocol designed for dynamic, distributed environments. Fast Raft reduces the number of message rounds needed to commit log entries compared to standard Raft by introducing a fast-track mechanism and reducing leader dependence. Our implementation uses gRPC and Kubernetes-based deployment across AWS availability zones. Experimental results demonstrate a throughput improvement and reduced commit latency under low packet loss conditions, while maintaining Raft's safety and liveness guarantees.