Package of heartbeat

heartbeat package is used to manage the heartbeat message of miner by HeartBeatManager. HeartBeatManager is responsible for sending and receiving heartbeat messages, and it maintains a white list of legal miners, all of whom can participate in consensus vote round.

Rules

There are some rules for heartbeat:

• The timestamp of each heartbeat cannot be the same
• The signature of each heartbeat can be verified
• The heartbeat must contains a proof of miner
• The interval between sending heartbeats can't be too long
• The timestamp in the heartbeat cannot differ too much from the local time.

And for a miner, the online 30min(Time can be changed) condition must be met

All time rules can be set by parameters, the parameters are in the params package(params/params.go):

• ONLINE_TIME_S: The duration of a miner must be online

• TIME_DEVIATION_S: The acceptable deviation of time for heartbeat

• SEND_HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL_S: The interval to send heartbeat

White list

All the miners in the white list are considered legal. The miner who wants to enter the white list must abide by the following rules：

• Make sure online is more than 30min
• Send heartbeat frequently

For testnet

For testnet, the first batch of miners do not need to wait for a while, so we can adjust the time parameter by rpc.

The interface is SetHeartBeatTime, it need three parameters:

• online to set the miner should online time
• deviation to set the acceptable deviation of time for heartbeat
• interval to set interval to send heartbeat