Performance study of Byzantine Agreement Protocol with artificial neural network

Since 1982, numerous Byzantine Agreement Protocols (BAPs) have been developed to solve arbitrary faults in the Byzantine Generals Problem (BGP). A novel BAP, using an artificial neural network (ANN), was proposed by Wang and Kao. It requires message exchange rounds similar to the traditional BAP and its suitability, in the context of network size, has not been investigated. In the present study, we propose to adopt Nguyen-Widrow initialization in ANN training, which modifies message communication and limits the message exchange rounds to three rounds. This modified approach is referred to as BAP-ANN. The BAP-ANN performs better than the traditional BAP, when the network size n is greater than nine. We also evaluate the message exchange matrix (MEM) constructed during the message exchange stage. For a fixed number of faulty nodes and remainder cases of (n mod 3), the study shows that the mean epoch for ANN training decreases as the network size increases, which indicates better fault tolerance.