X-shard: Optimistic Cross-Shard Transaction Processing for Sharding-based Blockchains

Recent advances in cryptocurrencies have sparked significant interest in blockchain technology. However, scalability issues remain a major challenge for wide adoption of blockchains. Sharding is a promising approach to scale blockchains, but existing sharding-based blockchains fail to achieve expect...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 35; no. 4; pp. 1 - 12
Main Authors: Xu, Jie, Ming, Yulong, Wu, Zihan, Wang, Cong, Jia, Xiaohua
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2024
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Blockchain
blockchain scalability
Blockchains
Cryptography
Digital currencies
Distributed system
Logic gates
optimistic concurrency control
Protocols
Resource management
Scalability
Sharding
Throughput
Transaction processing
ISSN:1045-9219, 1558-2183
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Recent advances in cryptocurrencies have sparked significant interest in blockchain technology. However, scalability issues remain a major challenge for wide adoption of blockchains. Sharding is a promising approach to scale blockchains, but existing sharding-based blockchains fail to achieve expected performance gains due to limitations in cross-shard transaction processing. In this paper, we propose X-shard, a blockchain system that optimizes cross-shard transaction processing, achieving high effective throughput and low processing latency. First, we allocate transactions to shards based on historical transaction patterns to minimize cross-shard transactions. Second, we take an optimistic strategy to process cross-shard transactions in parallel as sub-transactions within input shards, thereby accelerating transaction processing. Finally, we employ a cross-shard commit protocol with threshold signatures to reduce communication overhead. We implement and deploy X-shard on Amazon EC2 clusters. Experimental results validate our theoretical analysis and show that as the number of shards increases, X-shard achieves nearly linear scaling in effective throughput and decreases in transaction processing latency.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:1045-9219
1558-2183
DOI:10.1109/TPDS.2024.3361180