With the continuous expansion of blockchain application scenarios, consortium chains have raised higher performance and security requirements for consensus mechanisms. Unlike public blockchains, consortium chains typically implement an admission mechanism that restricts participation to trusted entities, ensuring that most replicas are honest and the number of faulty nodes remains small under normal circumstances. In such settings, conventional Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols, which are designed for worst-case adversarial scenarios, incur excessive message exchanges and computational overhead, thereby limiting performance and scalability. To address this issue, this paper proposes T-RBFT, a two-layer consensus mechanism inspired by network sharding and enhanced by the trusted execution environment (TEE). In T-RBFT, consensus nodes are first dynamically grouped based on their runtime characteristics. Then, inter-group consensus is achieved through a TEE-assisted BFT protocol, while each group internally reaches agreement using an improved Raft-based mechanism. Experimental evaluation shows that T-RBFT reduces communication overhead and latency, and achieves higher throughput compared to existing two-layer consensus protocols, providing a scalable and communication-efficient consensus protocol for permissioned blockchain networks.

翻译：随着区块链应用场景的持续扩展，联盟链对共识机制的性能与安全性提出了更高要求。与公有链不同，联盟链通常采用准入机制限制参与节点为可信实体，从而在正常情况下保证多数副本诚实且故障节点数量较少。在此类场景中，传统为最坏对抗场景设计的拜占庭容错协议会产生过多的消息交换与计算开销，从而限制其性能与可扩展性。针对这一问题，本文提出T-RBFT——一种受网络分片启发并借助可信执行环境增强的两层共识机制。T-RBFT首先根据运行时特征对共识节点进行动态分组，随后通过TEE辅助的BFT协议实现组间共识，而各组内部则采用改进的Raft机制达成一致。实验评估表明，与现有两层共识协议相比，T-RBFT在降低通信开销与时延的同时实现了更高吞吐量，为许可区块链网络提供了一种可扩展且通信高效的共识协议。