An Improved PBFT Consensus Algorithm for Supply Chain Finance

Supply chain finance is a financing scheme to provide financial services for the enterprises of supply chain. Blockchain technology, with distributed, traceable and non-tamperable characteristics, offers opportunities to solve problems in the development of supply chain finance. Consensus algorithms are the key to ensuring the efficient cooperation of the blockchain, among which the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) algorithm has a wide range of applications in consortium chains which solves the core issue of how to make nodes keep their data consistent. However, the PBFT algorithm has a higher communication overhead and does not support the nodes join or exit. It is difficult to meet the requirement of supply chain finance. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved PBFT algorithm for Supply Chain Finance, named PBFT-SCF. Firstly, a dynamic node entry and exit mechanism be designed for dynamically changing the number of nodes at runtime. Secondly, the scoring model is established to build an appropriate consensus node group, which replaces the original that all nodes participate in consensus so that the resource consumption can be reduced. Finally, the consistency protocol of the PBFT algorithm is optimized to achieve higher efficiency. Results indicate that the PBFT-SCF algorithm has better characteristics in terms of consensus efficiency and communication overhead. Specifically, when the number of node is 46, the transaction latency is reduced to 3.5% and the number of communication times is 2.8% of the PBFT algorithm.