Healthor: Protecting the Weak in Heterogeneous DLTs with Health-aware Flow Control

Permissionless distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) utilize an underlying peer-to-peer network to disseminate transactions. These types of networks have been shown to be highly heterogeneous. However, current DLTs fail to consider this heterogeneity which can render low-end nodes to be unable to participate in consensus. In this paper we introduce Healthor, a novel heterogeneity-aware flow-control mechanism that formalizes this heterogeneity in a notion of health of a node. In our early simulation results we show that Healthor enables high-end nodes to protect their weaker neighbors by buffering at their end while incurring only minimal overhead.