TimesNet-BFT: Mitigating Network State Uncertainty in Byzantine Consensus via Deep Temporal Modeling

Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols serve as the cornerstone of data consistency in permissioned blockchains; however, their scalability is inherently constrained by stochastic leader-centric bottlenecks and rigid, non-adaptive timeout mechanisms. Existing rule-based heuristics often fail to capture high-entropy and time-varying network latency, leading to frequent view changes and severe performance degradation under network volatility. To mitigate this epistemic uncertainty, this paper proposes TimesNet-BFT, a novel entropy-aware optimization framework. By leveraging TimesNet’s transformation of one-dimensional time series into two-dimensional tensors for multi-periodicity analysis, the framework accurately characterizes stochastic nodal latency patterns to facilitate entropy-minimized dynamic leader election and adaptive timeout strategies. Extensive evaluations conducted on simulated and real-world trace-driven Internet of Vehicles (IoV) scenarios validate the proposed approach, achieving a prediction MAPE below 5% alongside robust zero-shot generalization. Notably, under high-entropy network conditions, the framework demonstrates up to a 191.9% increase in throughput and mitigates latency variance by 73.3%, effectively neutralizing the structural bottlenecks inherent to traditional information-agnostic protocols. Crucially, by mathematically decoupling consensus safety from AI prediction errors, the system introduces an aggressive liveness paradigm that maintains minimal control plane overhead while significantly enhancing the entropic stability of the consensus process.