Dynamic Transaction Confirmation Sharding Protocol for Alliance Chain

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 13; no. 12; p. 6911
• Main Authors: Sun, Nigang, Li, Junlong, Zhang, Yuanyi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-06-2023
• Subjects: Algorithms; alliance chain; Analysis; Blockchain; blockchain scaling; Collaboration; Communication; Congestion; Cost reduction; Credit card processing services; Efficiency; Fault tolerance; Information sharing; Logistics; Nodes; Protocol; scalability; sharding protocol; Supply chain management; Supply chains; Transaction processing; Germany
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app13126911

Alliance chain has gained widespread popularity in industrial and commercial fields due to its multi-centralization and node manageability. Current implementations of the alliance chain suffer from scalability obstacles, such as communication congestion and throughput drop, when the number of nodes increases. In this paper, a novel dynamic transaction confirmation sharding protocol is proposed, which improves transaction processing efficiency by partitioning nodes and assigning different transactions to different shards. It utilizes dynamic transaction confirmation consensus as a sharding intra-consensus mechanism to minimize message size and package transactions into microblocks, which modifies communication content during transaction propagation among shards and reduces network congestion and shard reconfigure cost. The protocol leverages a review system and reputation model to identify and punish malicious nodes and also incorporates a verifiable random function for node configuration, which ensures a sufficient number of honest nodes within the shard and prevents repeated consensus processes. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms mainstream used permissioned chain sharding protocols Attested HyperLedger and Sharper, achieving a throughput improvement of at least 20%. This protocol is suitable for scenarios requiring high throughput and reliability in industrial and commercial fields such as finance, logistics, and supply chain management. Even if the number of alliance chain nodes increases to the usual maximum, or there are some faulty nodes, the protocol can still maintain stable performance.