The need for high throughput and censorship resistance in blockchain technology has led to research on DAG-based consensus. The Sui blockchain protocol uses a variant of the Bullshark consensus algorithm due to its lower latency, but this leader-based protocol causes performance issues when candidate leaders crash. In this paper, we explore the ideas pioneered by Carousel on providing Leader-Utilization and present HammerHead. Unlike Carousel, which is built with a chained and pipelined consensus protocol in mind, HammerHead does not need to worry about chain quality as it is directly provided by the DAG, but needs to make sure that even though validators might commit blocks in different views the safety and liveness is preserved. Our implementation of HammerHead shows a slight performance increase in a faultless setting, and a drastic 2x latency reduction and up to 40% throughput increase when suffering faults (100 validators, 33 faults).

翻译：区块链技术对高吞吐量与抗审查性的需求推动了基于有向无环图（DAG）的共识研究。Sui区块链协议采用Bullshark共识算法的变体以降低延迟，但当候选领导者崩溃时，这种基于领导者的协议会引发性能问题。本文探索了Carousel提出的"领导者利用率"思想，并提出了HammerHead。与Carousel构建于链式流水线共识协议不同，HammerHead无需关注链质量（该特性由DAG直接保障），但需确保即使验证者在不同视图提交区块，安全性和活性能得以保持。我们的HammerHead实现显示：在无故障场景下性能略有提升；当发生故障时（100个验证者，33个故障），延迟降低达2倍，吞吐量提升最高达40%。