To Squelch or not to Squelch: Enabling Improved Message Dissemination on the XRP Ledger

With the large increase in the adoption of blockchain technologies, their underlying peer-to-peer networks must also scale with the demand. In this context, previous works highlighted the importance of ensuring efficient and resilient communication
for the underlying consensus and replication mechanisms. However, they were mainly focused on mainstream Distributed Ledger Technologies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, and generally, Proof-ofWork-based designs. In this paper, the problem is investigated in the context of consensus-validation based blockchains, like the XRP Ledger.
The latter relies on a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus mechanism which is proven to have a good scalability in regards to the transaction throughput. However, it is known that the size of the network constituting the XRP Ledger is
limited, and significant increases would be challenging to achieve. The main reason is the simple flooding mechanism used to disseminate the messages related to the consensus protocol, which creates many duplicates in the network. Squelching is a recent solution proposed for limiting this duplication, however, it was never evaluated quantitatively in real-life scenarios involving the XRPL production network. In this paper, our aim is to assess this mechanism using a real-life controllable testbed and the XRPL production network, to assess its benefit and compare it to alternative solutions relying on Named Data Networking and on a gossip-based approach.