Cheetah: Pipelined BFT Consensus Protocol with High Throughput and Low Latency

Recent blockchain consensus protocols, such as HotStuff and Jolteon, employ pipelining combined with leader rotation to achieve both efficiency and fairness. However, these pipelined protocols encounter a significant challenge: performance degradation in the presence of faulty replicas. This issue stems from the dependency of block commits on multiple consecutive honest leaders within the pipelined protocols. The inability to ascertain the honesty of subsequent leaders exacerbates this problem. To address this limitation, we introduce Cheetah, a novel protocol that implements an independent block commitment mechanism. This mechanism enables Cheetah to commit blocks successfully without relying on multiple leaders (whether consecutive or not), thus preventing performance degradation in the presence of faulty replicas. Our results demonstrate that Cheetah consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art pipelined protocols across various scenarios.